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Addresses aB.dlMessag^ 



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6 ai^rrtOl* of Kari.Sd.S: 




Addresses and Messages 
by 

ARTHUR CAPPER 

Twenty-Second Governor 
of Kansas 



Published by 
CAPPER PRINTING COMPANY, 
Topeka, Kansas. 
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GIFT 



MAY3119"! 
THE mi.^ fcF GC;jS3ESS 



Table of Contents 



War Addresses and Messages 
Proclamations and Addresses 

Patriotism 

Inaugural and Lesislative Addresses 
Kansas and Kansas Ideals 
Politics and Good Government . 
Prohibition Addresses .... 
Educational and Inspirational Talks 
Farming and Farmers' Problems 
Church and Public Welfare Addresses 
Miscellaneoits Addresses 
[K^dex 



1 
109 
179 
203 
277 
301 
365 
421 
479 
519 
573 
611 



Arthur Capper As War Governor 

Arthur Caliper's salient service to his native state was 
])er formed as its War Governor. He was elected governor 
in 1914, assuming his office in January, 1915, four months 
after Germany's invasion of Belgium. Even then the war 
in Europe had thrown its dark shadow across the world and 
far-seeing men sought to penetrate it and to know the 
future as it must affect America. 

Anticipating the inevitable extension of the conflict, Gov- 
ernor Capper on March 15, 1917, even before war was de- 
;clared, summoned leading citizens to the State Capitol to 
constitute a State Council of Defense. It was after this 
model that the National Council of Defense, with its 
branches in all the states, was later patterned. At the first 
regular meeting of the Kansas Council of Defense, shortly 
after war was declared, Governor Capper made an address 
asserting Kansas' united determination to get behind the 
national government with all her power and resources, and 
the state's subsequent supplies of money, food and men 
confirmed the soundness of the governor's interpretation 
of public feeling. 

The duties of every governor, already heavy, were quad- 
rupled by the entrance of the nation into the war. Espe- 
cially was this true of Governor Capper, who from the out- 
set of his public career had followed the "open door" 
policy — that is, making the governor's office a place of 
welcome to even the humblest citizen. The executive office 
now became the agency for operating the machinery of the 
selective service law by which the great army was brought 
into existence, and this alone greatly increased the gov- 
ernor's duties. As a consequence there was not a day that 
the governor's office was not crowded with visitors who 
came to appeal to him for his influence and help. 



The patriotic meetings which were held thruout the state 
were a heavy draft ou the War Governor's time. Not a 
day passed that a half dozen or more requests for speeches 
in various parts of the state were not received. Even from 
other states came similar calls. During the year following 
the declaration of war, Governor Capper made more than 
300 patriotic addresses and spoke at meetings in 102 of the 
105 counties of the state. In addition, he wrote numerous 
letters to the President, to the Food Administrator, and 
to various members of the President's Cabinet, urging that 
tlie men who were called to war have the cleanest and most 
wholesome surroundings, both physical and moral, that it 
was possible to supply at the camps where they trained, 
and he was none the less zealous in appealing for a square 
deal for the men who grew the food on the farm with which 
the army was fed. In the following pages will be found 
(,'xcerpts from speeches, messages, letters and proclamations 
dealing witli these multifarious war questions, from the 
time of the sinking of the Lusitania down to the close of 
the war, all of which make up a part of the record of 
Arthur Capper as a War Governor. 

M. M. 



WAR ADDRESSES 

AND 

MESSAGES 



KANSAS AND THE LUSITANIA. 

From a Statement Made hij Governor Capper on May 10, 
1915, FoUou-iny the News of the Sinking of the Lusi- 
tania. 

To the Editor of the Chicago Tribune : 

Replying to your inquiry of May 10 : The wanton mas- 
sacre of innocent American non-combatants by the de- 
struction of the Lusitania in utter disregard of all rules of 
civilized warfare has shocked our people beyond measure. 
Kansas is happily free from the spirit of jingoism ; the 
sentiment of the state is overwhelmingly against war and 
we should greatly deplore any hasty action that would tend 
to involve this nation in the wicked and unnecessary con- 
test that is wasting all Europe ; but our national honor 
must be maintained ; our flag must command the respect 
of every belligerent and the life of every American citizen 
must be held sacred on every sea and in every land. The 
war lords of the earth must learn now that "strict account- 
ability to Washington" is not an idle phrase. 

The people of Kansas, realizing that President Wilson is 
confronted by the gravest crisis in this country since the 
secession, have every confidence in his courage, wisdom 
and discretion, and I am happy to pledge to him the state 's 
loyal support in whatever course his good judgment shall 
dictate that the government shall pursue in maintaining 
our national honor. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



KANSAS BUCKLES ON THE ARMOR. 

From an Address at the First Formal Meeting of the State 
Council of Defense, Topeka, April 17, 1917. 

You have been called together to effect an organization to 
be known as the Kansas State Council of Defense, charged 
with the duty of organizing the resources of Kansas, men 
and wealth, in tlie defense of the nation in the war which 
we are now waging in behalf of freedom and peace. I need 
not dwell upon the gravity of the situation. You realize 
that having entered the war America must do its utmost to 
win ; and every loyal citizen must stand ready to give his 
all, if necessary, to the success of our cause. Compara- 
tively few" of us will be called upon to enlist ; the brunt of 
battle will be borne by one or two per cent of our popula- 
tion, but there is not a man nor woman in Kansas who can- 
not do something, and it is the duty of this committee so 
to organize and mobilize the state that every citizen may 
be able to do his full part in the gigantic task which we" 
have undertaken. The industries which supply food and 
clothing for the army and which sustain our people at home 
and hel]) support our allies abroad, are rendering a service 
no less than that performed by our men in the field and on 
the sea. As a matter of fact we all recognize that the feed- 
ing of the famine-threatened world is the first and most 
impoi-tant duty of loyal Americans. 

Tliis is csiiccially ti'nc of Kansas and the Middle West. 
We must produce in the Mississippi Valley not only food 
f(M' the llnited States, but the maximum surplus for the 
armies and peoples abroad, and it is very necessary that 
we organize for the work and go about it in a systematic, 
business-like, efficient manner. 



LOCAL CO-OPERATION 3 

I sliall not attempt to outline to this Conneil its nietliod 
of procedure, nor to define the scope of its activities. The 
plan of organization and work calls for your best consider- 
ation. I can only urge upon you the importance of dis- 
patch in all you undertake. I take it for granted that you 
Mall divide the Council into sub-committees to deal with 
specific problems and that you will call to your aid on 
committees any citizen or any officer of an institution, state 
or denominational, whose services you need. A request 
from this Council for assistance should be considered a 
demand by every loyal citizen. 

It seems to me that you will be able to work most effec- 
tively thru local committees, as it is, of course, impossible 
to cover the state thoroly from here. I suggest, therefore, 
that you organize in every county of the state a County 
C^ouncil of Defense, with similar councils in the larger 
towns ; this state council acting in .advisory and supervisory 
capacity, but depending upon the local councils to carry 
out the details of the propaganda. It seems to me that it 
is only in this way we can reach every community and 
neighborhood. 

Among the problems requiring immediate attention, I 
will mention these : 

(1) There is shortage of many kinds of seeds, especially 
potatoes, beans and peas, and in many instances the seeds 
of corn and kafir are of low quality. A complete seed sur- 
vey should be made quickly and arrangements effected for 
testing all seeds that will be used. We cannot afford to 
run risks. 

(2) Many farmers will be hampered in extending their 
operations by the lack of ready funds for the purchase of 
seeds and needed e(iuipment. The farmers of Kansas must 
employ all available labor-saving machinery that will en- 
able them to plant and cultivate the larger acreage and 
more thoroly till and care for the acreage planted. I sug- 
gest that a sub-committee be directed to organize the bank- 
ers of the state with the object of devising means of putting 



4 INCREASING STATE PRODUCTION 

at the e'ommand of fanners who may need it, ample funds 
to enlarg-e their operations. 

(3) Farm hibor. Every effort must be made to employ 
all available labor. The state Bureau of Labor ean doubt- 
less co-operate with you in mobilizing the unemploj^ed. 
Boys from our high schools and colleges and others who 
are not eligible for military service, should be encouraged 
to enlist in this important branch of national service. Our. 
people must be impressed with the fact as expressed at the 
St. Louis conference that "the man who tills the soil and 
supports the soldiers in the field and the families at home 
is rendering as noble and patriotic a service as is the man 
wlio bears the brunt of battle." President Wilson has 
joined in this a}>peal for farm labor and service upon the 
farms for the purpose of providing an adequate food sup- 
ply, and it must be made as honorable as enlistment in the 
army and navy. I think it probably would be well to or- 
ganize volunteers for this purpose. 

(4) The work of organizing boys' and girls' clubs must 
be pushed. The extension department of both the agricul- 
tural college and the university will assist in this. The 
l)ropaganda for the utilization of back yards and vacant, 
lots in the cities and towns must be continued, and we must 
safe-guard against a waning of interest when the days get 
warm ami enthusiasm runs low. AVe must continue gar- 
dening thruout tlie summer. 

(5) A systematic effort should be made to encourage 
farmers to increase the number of livestock on their farms. 
Hogs should be bred for fall litters, and late as it is. more 
poultry should be hatched. The Kansas farmer can well 
afford to increase his holdings in sheep. It has been shown 
that by liberal feeding of heifer calves through the first 
winter it is feasible to have them drop calVes at two years 
of ; ge inster.d of three as at present. On the 200, OOO heif- 
ers in Kansas at the present time this would mean an in- 
creasetl calf crop next year of 160,000. 

(6) It is not certain what action the government will 



THE PRACTICE OF ECONOMICS 5 

take in regard to the regulation of food prices, but without 
waiting for that, this council should take steps to discour- 
age speculation in food products and the forcing of prices 
beyond reason by exploiters. The shortage of food of itself 
will impose a sufficient burden upon the consumer without 
arbitrary increase of prices from motives of greed. The 
man who attempts to exploit the people in such a time as 
this, especially by means of the necessities of life, is an 
enemy of his country. 

(7) I believe a traffic committee should be appointed to 
co-operate with the railroads of the state in effecting the 
most expeditious and economical transportation of food 
stuffs and equipment and supplies necessary to production. 
I am sure the railway officials of Kansas may be tlepencled 
upon to render the best possible service. The people must 
co-operate with them. 

(8) Care of dependents. The federal government is 
making an effort to enlist only single men, but many of 
these have relatives who are dependent upon their earn- 
ings for support. A systematic effort must be made to see 
that no one in Kansas dependent upon an enlisted man 
suffers. Every community in the state should have a re- 
lief committee to attend to this work. 

(9) Household economies. It is the food-stuffs left over 
after our requirements are satisfied that will win this war. 
It may be necessary for us to restrict our requirements. 
Kansas can do almost as much in the prevention of waste 
as by increasing the production of her farms. This council 
should undertake a state-wide campaign in the interest of 
home economics, educating our people to a greater utiliza- 
tion of food ; economies in purchasing and more scientific 
preparation. We must make economy in the kitchen and 
at the table a fashion, and extravagance and useless luxury 
bad form. It is of especial importance that well-to-do fam- 
ilies be impressed with the necessity of conserving our food 
supply. 

(10) It would be well for the council to co-operate with 



6 LOYAL SERVICE AND SACRIFICE 

the state and local Red Cross Associations in promoting the 
noble work which they are doing. 

(11) The National Council of Defense has asked that the 
mayor's of all cities make a survey of property, including 
mills, elevators, stock yards and railway terminals that 
should be given special protection during the war. Home 
guards should be organized in every city. The council 
shoidd call for such survey and report to the proper au- 
thorities any cases in which the local government cannot 
provide adequate protection. 

(12) Enlistment. It should be a part of the work of 
this council to encourage enlistment in the army and navy. 
I am sure Kansas will readily respond to a formal call 
for volunteers, but a committee of the council should be 
charged with the work of encouraging the enlistment of 
those who can best be spared from productive pursuits. 
We do not want to demoralize our industries, especially 
those concerned with the production of food. 

These are only a few scattering suggestions on the work 
before you. I know that every member of this council 
aiiju-eciates the need for promjit aiul efficient action. Kan- 
sas must- do more than seiul her full quota of soldiers to 
the field. AVe nuist produce and conserve. We must save 
at home and create a surplus to send abroad. We must 
give the nation loyal service in time and effort and sacri- 
fice in order that Kansas may not fail in her full dut.v to 
the sacred cause of freedom and liberty. 



KANSANS AND PREPAREDNESS. 

From on Afhiress at the City Auditorium, Introducing 
President Woodrow Wilson on the Occasion of His Visit 
to Topelxd, Feb. 2, 1916. 

The people of the United States today face a problem 
of goverinnental policy serious in its nature and momen- 
tous in its effect upon our ultimate destiny. So vital, so 



A PEACE LOVING PEOPLE 7 

serious, so momentous is it, that it transcends all partisan 
consideration, all personal prejudice. We must bring- to 
it our soberest, sanest and wisest thought — with this one 
idea in mind : What is best for ultimate America ? Nay, 
the question even is broader than that: What is best for 
the people of the earth — for the human race? 

The distinguishetl gentleman who is our guest and who 
will address us this afternoon, is honored and respected 
and beloved by the American people, not only because he 
is our President, but because of those qualities of heart and 
mind which endear good men to their fellows. He has 
spoken for peace among the nations as we would speak for 
it. He has ho]iorably and steadfastly kept us out of the 
terrible conflict in Europe. He has sat undismayed on 
the hottest lid that has seated any President since Lincoln. 

Many of us are not in accord with the program of vast 
armament, with all its hazardous consequences, and the the- 
ory of a chance or a possible foe. But we welcome the full- 
est discussion, and we feel the deepest respect and sympathy 
for the head of the nation in this grave hour. We sincerely 
desire to avoid embarrassing him ; we earnestly wish to do 
all we can do to help a policy that shall result in the greatest 
good to our people and to the world. 

And whatever our opinions in regard to armaments, this 
day we Kansans, all, are for President Wilson — and for 
Mrs. Wilson, too. We extend them a cordial, warm-hearted 
Kansas welcome. 

Kansans are a peace-loving people. We maintain an effi- 
cient National Guard which ranks well with the militia of 
other states, but for thirty-one years that guard has not been 
called to active service — a longer period of freedom from 
riot and turmoil than any other state has experienced. 

We are not a craven people, we are deeply and intensely 
patriotic. In the Civil War Kansas contributed a larger 
number of volunteers to the Union army, in proportion to its 
population, than any other state. We are not afraid to fight 



8 INCREASED PRODUCTION 

if we must ; but we hope that necessity will never more arise 
and we pray we shall not be led into temptation. 

It is with fireat pleasure that I introduce to the people of 
Topeka and of Kansas the President of the United States. 



PREPARE NOW FOR WAR CONDITIONS. 

Prom an Address to a Pre-War Conference Held in the 
Governor's Office, Topeka, Kan., March J 5, 1917. 

With the danger of America's participation in the war 
becoming more grave every day, it surely is a part of wis- 
dom — of sound business sense as well as patriotism — for us 
to stop a moment and take stock of our resources ; to face 
the situation and to decide if the extraordinary condition in 
which we find ourselves does not call for a method of pro- 
cedure somewhat out of the ordinary and unusual. A clear 
understanding of the situation in regard to the world's food 
supply and market conditions, and a frank interchange of 
thought by such men as are here assembled will lead to more 
intelligent effort in meeting what threatens to become a 
serious condition. 

I am thoi'oly convinced that business foresight counsels 
a speeding-up of production ; the world needs every i)oun(l 
of foodstuffs that we can produce, and the world is ready to 
pay for it; so j)atriotism aside, business sense says "Pro- 
duce it ;" 

1 hope you will give due consideration to the jiotential 
possibilities of the cultivation of vacant lots in cities aiul 
towns and tiie growing of a larger portion of the family food 
supply on the farm. A number of Kansas towns are already 
arrjnging for the use of vacant tracts of land; this should 
be encouraged in a systematic manner. 

I trust that this conference may outline a constructive 
program, based on sound economic principles, embodying 
suggestions of what to grow and the best methods of grow- 



FARMER A BUSINESS MAN 9 

iny ; the securing of adequate farm labor ; the economical 
marketing" of farm products ; the financing of the producer 
who is hampered by lack of capital, and such other points as 
may occur to you as pertinent to a larger agricultural pro- 
duction in Kansas in the immediate future. 

We all realize, I am sure, that we must approach these 
questions in a sane, businesslike manner ; keeping in mind 
that the farmer is a business man,* governed by the same mo- 
tives as munition-makers and other business men. It is his 
business, his duty, to make his farm yield the largest possi- 
ble income. If our deliberations and suggestions are to 
carry any weight whatever, they must be based upon that. 



KANSAS WAS SETTLED BY FIGHTING MEN. 

Address at the Annual Convention of Woodmen of the 
World, at Pittshurg, Kan., April 10, 1917. 

Kansas stands for a league to enforce peace and for tlv 
enforcement of law between nations. But it is and alwai'^ 
has been a figliting state. It was settled by soldiers aii- 
fighting men. Just a handful of pioneers were in the litti- 
band that held a horde of savage foes at bay and later 
fought a bloody four-years war on the border to make Kan- 
sas a free state. None of these men had to be drafted. 

After them came the real settlers of Kansas, the 128.000 
or 1)30,000 veterans who took up homes here or went into 
business here after the Civil War. They volunteered for 
that war and then they volunteered for Kansas, for they 
underwent many hardships in the then young state. 

And let me tell you what will be telling you no secret : 
Kansas is ready now to more than fill its (juota in this war, 
and the young men who are to fill it are descendants of thes»- 
volunteer soldiers of the 60 's. I am in a position to knov 
that Uncle Sam won't have to draft or conscript these young 
men to get them to fight for him as heroically as their fath- 



10 KANSAS IS READY 

ers or their graudfatliers did before them. They will beat 
him to it if he will give them half a chance. There will be 
50,000 volunteers in Kansas jnst as quick as President Wil- 
son calls for them. 

The one thing, I discover, of which these fine young fel- 
lows are proudest is that their fathers served the country in 
their day not because they had to but because they wanted 
1(). They luivc alwavs heard that to be drafted was to be 
disgraced. 

Drafting an iirmy is properly a last resort. It is not the 
way to begin a war. But now that war has come there is 
only one sentiment in Kansas or in the nation, and that is 
to stand loyally and unitedly behind the government at 
Washington. In spirit we are already a nation in arms. 
I^ncle Sam need not compel his young men to fight for him 
when they are willing, ready and glad to offer him their 
lives. But when the war is over they want to lay aside the 
sword and again take up the peaceful occupations of life, 
not remain as a cog in a military machine. 



KANSAS ALWAYS READY TO FIGHT FOR THE 

RIGHT. 

J'h-oni Mrinorud Daif Address at Wichltn, May 30, 1917. 

I wish I could talk to you in an optimistic way of the 
future of the war. 1 should like to say to you that in all 
probability tlie war will end in six or eight months, l)ut 
the sooner we awaken to a I'ealization that we are in the 
greatest war the world has ever known, that we are into it 
uj) 1o our necks, that it is now just as much our war as it 
is the war of the French, the English and the Germans; 
th it the sooner we become aroused to the seriousness and 
enormit.y of the task which now is ours; and that the war 
cannot possibly end inside of two or three years, the better 
it will be for us as a people and as a nation. 



AMERICA'S CAUSE HOLY 11 

I have no uneasiness over what Kansas will do. Kansas 
has always been ready to fight when there was fighting to 
be done. We sent more men to the Union army between 
the years '61 and '65 in proportion to our population, than 
any other state in the Union. During that war when our 
total number of voters was only 17,000, we contributed 
21,000 enlisted men to that struggle. 

Our President, our government, have been patient. But 
there comes a time when patience is futile, when it is 
wrong. If we are to maintain American honor, American 
freedom, all those things we hold dearer than life itself, 
there is only one thing for us to do and that is to get be- 
hind the government unitedly, loyally, whole-heartedly. 
What we think might have been done or what we think 
ought to have been done does not concern us now. Our 
plain duty, whatever our political creed, whatever our 
place of birth, whatever our opinions, is now to give the 
national government the best there is in us — to give it un- 
sparing, loyal service. This war is not going, to end until 
we end it. We must bring the world from murder back 
to peace. There has been no finer cause to fight for since 
time began. It is holy and you are called. There is a 
place and a duty for every one of us. Whatever that duty 
may be. and wherever it may be, let us resolve to go to it 
with a will, Kansas fashion and undismayed. 



WE'VE GOT TO LIMIT GREED. 

From an Address at the Annual Meeting of the Fraternal 
Aid Union, Topeka, Kan., April 30, 1917. 

It was discovered last week that while potatoes were sell- 
ing for something like 16 cents a pound in New York, and 
not a great deal less in other big cities, 3,000 cars of potatoes 
were held on track in Chicago by speculators to boost the 
price still higher. It also was discovered the same week that 
200 ears of es'as were standing in Chicago terminals while 



12 SPECULATORS NATIONAL ENEMY 

tlie food speculators who owned them ' ' made the market. ' ' 

This sort of manipulation is criminal. It is a crime against 
the consumer and the producer, for it lessens consumption 
and causes unstable markets. It is a crime against the pub- 
lic welfare, for it causes deprivation and suffering to those 
least able to bear it — the small wage-earner and his family — 
a class comprising about half the population of the United 
States. It is a crime against government, for it incites food 
riots and other disorders having grave consequences, I am 
not in favor of capital punishment, but prison is too good 
for such men. 

It is important for town people to know that the farmer 
gets none of the high profit in foodstuffs. A 50 per cent 
increase is always tacked on to his products as soon as they 
leave his hands, and the speculators double and triple this 
price. The producer has no hand in the present holdup. 
The products of last harvest long ago passed out of his 
hands. He has profited by none of the tremendous ad- 
vances since that time. 

We have got to put some limit on human greed in this 
country. I have made an urgent appeal to the President 
and to the federal trades commission for action to stop this 
exploiting of the necessaries of life. In the meantime I shall 
use all the power and prestige of the governor's office to 
check such holdups, so far as the state of Kansas can check 
them. 

I believe the government should seize and dispose of all 
large stocks of foodstuffs held for speculative purposes in 
times of stress, paying the speculator the price he paid and 
no more, and punishing the speculator by both fine and im- 
prisonment, lie would be bound to get in jail then, because 
no judge could let him off with a fine and a moral lectut-e. 
How much do such fellows care for fines or lectures? It 
may be, too, we should limit profit, making it unlawful to 
hold food stocks beyond a certain percentage of rise. 

It ought to be accounted treason in time of war, if at no 
otiiei- time, for speculators to starve the people by putting 



CLEAN AND WHOLESOME MANHOOD 13 

prices on products impossible for anyone to pay except the 
wealthy. Besieging: armies frequently starve an enemy peo- 
ple into submission, but then the people have only to sur- 
render to get food. The American food gambler, whom the 
country defends and protects in time of war, shows his com- 
patriots less mercy. He gives them no alternative. They 
must starve or pay. He treats them worse than a foe would 
treat them and he is a greater enemy to his country. He is 
the real Benedict Arnold. In time of war, many a man has 
been hanged for less to the great benefit of the country. 



AN APPEAL FOR CLEAN CAMPS. 

From an Address at Clay Coder, Kan., Opera House, 
May 25, 1917. 

Our Kansas boys are responding to their country's call in 
the way Kansas always responds in national emergencies. 
The war de]>artment records at Washington show that Kan- 
sas is ahead of all other states in filling its quota for the 
army, for the navy and for the National Guard. By the 
end of this year 30,000 of our finest, cleanest, manliest boys 
— the flower of the state's young manhood — will be march- 
ing with the colors. 

The mothers and fathers of Kansas are offering these 
brave sons in the true Kansas spirit — in the spirit of hero- 
ism and sacrifice and devotion to their country. 

Now in that same spirit, in the name of these loyal fathers 
and mothers, and in the name of the best citizensliip of Kan- 
sas and all that is right and just, T am demanding of Presi- 
dent AVi^^^on and the War Department that every power of 
the federal government, civil and military, be invoked and 
exercised to guarantee to these boys the best possible envir- 
onment, moral and physical, that they may be returned to 
their homes at the close of the war sound, dean, wholesome, 
sober men. I am demanding that Congress and the AVar 



14 VICE DEADLIER THAN BULLETS 

Dei)artnK'nt iiuiint..in a safety zone of not less than 10 miles 
around these eamps, in which the traffic in liquor and vice 
shall absolutely be prohibited by the government. 

This much, at least, is due these boys, is due these mothers 
and fathers, is due the people of Kansas, the state which has 
done more than any other to maintain and promote the high- 
est standards of decency and sobriety in the tlaily life of its 
people. 

The records of former wars show that conditions of in- 
temperance and vice surrouiiding the camps, have been more 
deadly to the boys at the front than the bullets of the enemy. 

These 30,000 Kansas mothers should not be called upon to 
f:uffer their sons in the springtime of their young manhood, 
to he m de the sport or the spoil of the insidious agencies of 
diunkenness ;,nd disease. These mothers have a right to in- 
sist — and I know they are insisting, because already I have 
had hundreds of letters from them — that camp surround- 
ings be kept free from these contaminating and debauching 
influences ; th..t their boys shall not be considered fair 
prey by the mor il pests and parasites of society, and that 
they sliall not be returned to them broken, degraded and 
.sh.attered, physically and morally. 

Aiul so I have urged the powers at Washington to give 
ear to this appeal from the mothers of Kansas, an appeal, 
it seems to me, tliat cannot and will not l)e denied. 



NOW DRAFT THE MONEY BAGS. 

Frow (tH Address to the Kansas Retailers' Association, 
Topcka, Kan., June 19, 1917. 

Tncle Sam has asked and promptly received from every 
yovnig nmn in the nation, a (luit-claim deed on his life. 
Parents Imve surrendered to the nation's call, hostages 
dearer to them than life itself. They have reared and 
cducft (1 tlii'se sons by years of stinting and self-denial. 



BIG BUSINESS AND TAXES 15 

They have expected to have them near as a solace and a 
comfort ill the years of that friendless and lonely old ao:e 
which comes to all who are not cut off in their time of 
usefulness. 

The homes of the nation are offering this blood sacrifice 
while home purses are being taxed as never before to main- 
tain these fighting legions. 

The people as a whole are ungrudging in their support 
of the war. It is the money bags that are slackers. Uncle 
Sam has called for 7 billions of American dollars for war 
expenditures this year, but big money is not fighting, yet. 
We have drafted the lives, but we haven't drafted the 
money bags. American wealth has been called on to hold 
up its end of the war, but is protesting, cringing, shirking, 
hiding out. 

So far, Uncle Sam's war-tax bills exact far more of the 
means of the man or family with small income, which has 
given a son or sons to the war, than it is exacting from the 
coupon-clipper and the war-fat trust. The Senate finance 
committee has learned that the enormous sum of 4 billions 
of dollars in war profits was made last year by the Steel 
trust, the Powder trust, the Packing trust and others. Let 
those who are profiting by war pay the costs of the war, 
or at least their share of them. 

Congress is proposing to take only 25 per cent or less of 
the excess profits of big business. It proposes a tax of 40 
per cent or less on millionaire incomes. To have a million 
a year coming in and being obliged to live twelve months 
on $600,000 of it, after Uncle Sam has taken his 40 per 
cent, does not seem a hardship to the family that strips 
itself of sons and money in this death-grapple for human 
freedom. 

Compared with the heavy sacrifice of love and treasure 
demanded from 999 out of every 1,000 American homes, 
the millionaire contributes nothing. But he and big busi- 
ness are begging off on that. 

England at the begimiing of the war conscripted 50 per 



16 TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE 

eent of r.ll war profits. England now is taking 75 per 
c'(Mit. Onr money bags, the fattest in all the world, squirm 
and squeal at a 25 per cent tax on war profits and the too 
moderate tax on ineomes. 

No m itter what we do. the people will have to shoulder 
the heaviest burden in this war. But in the name of jus- 
tice, f irness and commonsense, let us have something ap- 
proximating a square deal. The people will be a tower of 
strength to Uncle Sim if they feel satisfied he is doing 
his best to make his war burdens eciuitable. Let him tax to 
the disa]ipearing point incomes above $100,000. Take half, 
or all. of excess profits. Tax high rents, rich franchises, 
idle land holdings. Such taxes are hardest to pass on to 
the consumer. And let him touch as lightly as possible, or 
not at all, on the tea, coffee, sugar and actual necessities 
of the people, alro:idy, in many instances, beyond the limit 
of their means. 



A FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY. 

From ail Address at \Y])ife Cloud, Kdii., Jidi/ 6, 1917. 

We did not wish to fight the Prussian military tyrants. 
They made the attack upon \is; not on our shores, but on 
our ships, our lives, our rights, our future. We are at war 
beciiuse we could not honorably keep out. 

We are in the midst of one of those great ujiheavals of 
civilization out of which ar(^ born great events that will 
affect Die whoh' fntnre of tlie human race. The world war 
is ill the fcarfnl l)irth throes of a world-democracy. 

This is a wai- to save America — to preserve a great and 
a ))atient peoi)le's decent self-renjiect, to justify 'our right 
to live as we have lived, not as some one else wishes us to 
live and pay tribute and lumiage to him. The United States 
became involved in this struggle not simply because war 
Avas made on it by the (Jei'inan government, bnt also be- 



THE GREAT POWER OF FREE AMERICA 17 

cause we recognized there could be no security in the world, 
that the next generation would live under the black shadow 
of impending wars of conquest, and the world go military- 
mad, unless the autoemtic ideal should now be overthrown. 

This is a titanic struggle between two irreconcilable 
ideals of civilization — the American ideal and the ideal of 
an autocratic state, ruling by the sword, recognizing no 
obligations in furthering its far-reaching ambitions ; know- 
ing no mercy, tramping out the lives of thousands of unof- 
fending, helpless women and children and feeble old men 
to gain an end, as unfeelingly as if they were straAv. 

AVhatever the difference of opinion may have been about 
peace or war heretofore — and there were honest differences 
of opinion as to whether America should have entered this 
war — the time for argument has passed. The President 
r.nd Congress have said the United States must get into the 
fight in self-defense. And now we are in the fight our 
duty to ourselves and to humanity is to win as quickly as 
possible: to assert the great power of free America with 
such telling effect in Europe that the appalling slaughte" 
of human beings shall be stopped in the shortest possible 
time. We are fighting for a peace founded upon jupLice, 
for an end to aggression, for a lasting peace by the only 
means that can obtain it — a successful American vtti\ Thru 
us, success of the allied arms in Europe meap' peace and 
security for the free nations of the earth for years to come, 
but this success depends on ii«. Failure means the constant 
threat, and, ultimately the effort, to impose the autocratic 
military idea of government by murder upon every dem- 
ocracy in the western hemisphere. 

Old Glory has always been kept unstained. In this great 
crisis the American people will be true to the best tradi- 
tions of their national life, and when peace shall have been 
concluded we shall have no cause to blush for America. 

I take comfort in the thought that this in all probability 
is the last great war. America will sit at the council table 
of peace. While she will seek nothing for herself, she will 



18 A LASTING PEACE 

demand that justice be done to all the belligerent nations. 
She will have the right to say, and will say, that lasting 
peace must be guaranteed to all the peoples of the earth for 
all time to come. It will be a just and democratic peace 
and not the iron rule of terror, humiliation and plunder, 
that goes by the name of Prussian militarism. 



AN UNBEATEN PEOPLE. 

From an Address at the Topeka Auditorium on the Occa- 
sion of the Visit of the Belgian High Commission, headed 
hy Baron Ludwic Moncheur, July 20, 1917. 

Kansas is honored by the visit to its capital of this dis- 
tinguished company representing that gallant little coun- 
try which was first to feel the iron heel and the mailed 
fist of the ruthless Hun. I assure Baron Moncheur that 
the sentiments we Kansans entertain for his countrymen 
embrace much more than pity for a stricken people and 
an outraged country; mingled with the pity is a high admi- 
rati-^n of the bravery and fortitude displayed by their 
noble.king and his valorous army, a lively sense of fellow- 
sliip tov a people too proud to bend the knee to the eon- 
(jueror and too high-minded to buy peace at the price of 
I)erfidy. Our visitors have the satisfaction of knowing 
that it is their perfidious assailants and not they that 
made of sacred treaties mere scraps of paper. Had Bel- 
gium acceded to the demand of the Hun for a right-of-way 
across her territory, the world might have made excuses 
for her on the ground that her weakness made any other 
(course impossible, but to the undying glory of the land that 
Baron Moncheur and his colleagues here represent, Bel- 
gium chose the way of the Cross and suffered martyrdom 
for ])rin('i])le, and so long as time shall last the world will 
sing jn-aises to her valor. 

From the outset, Kansas, along with all the other states 
of one riii(m, resented the unlawful invasion of Belgium 



BELGIUM'S STAND FOR HUMANITY 19 

by the German, and she showed her sympathy aud under- 
standing by an immediate and generous response to the 
c:ill for help from tlie stricken land. I call attention to this 
fact, not to glorify anything that we as a people have done 
to alleviate in some measure the terrible suffering there, 
but merely as an evidence that Kansas has understood the 
Belgian question from the start. Whatever we have done 
is little enough, God knows, for now we know that it is 
Belgium that saved the world. And while Belgians are 
now suffering the agony of seeing their loved land in the 
hands of the invader and despoiler, I state with all confi- 
dence that the day will come when King Albert will lead 
the remnants of his gallant army back to his capital in 
glory and triumph. 

To attempt to predict when that great day will come 
would be the height of folly, but that it will come some 
time I have every confidence, and I know our distinguished 
visitors share that confidence. It is gratifying, too, to 
know that Kansans will share with Belgians the joys of that 
great day. Already hundreds of thousands of Americans- 
are in khaki training in the army camps, and each day 
sees the number increasing. Soon they will be over->eas. 
taking their part in the titanic struggle. That they will 
do their part worthily we know. I am prompt*^! to say 
this by no spirit of vainglory but because thp- is the his- 
tory of the American soldier and sailor ir every war in 
which we have engaged. 



RUSSIA'S VALIANT DEFENSE. 

From an Address Delivered from the Steps of the State 
House, Topeka, on the Occasion of the Visit of General 
Vladimir Roop, of the Russian Mission, July 27, 1917. 
(Several Hundred Russian-horn Citizens of Topeka were 

present.) 

In welcoming- General Roop and his confreres of the 
Russian mission, I desire to assure him that Kansans are 
not disheartened by the temporary reverses of the armies 
in which he has had the honor to serve valiantly as a 
soldier. In the transition from a monarchy to a republic 
it was inevitable that some disturbances would occur, but 
we have confidence that under Premier Kerensky or some 
other g-reat popular leader the Russian people will find 
themselves and once more become a factor in the great 
b&ttle for democracy. 

I^<!tween the United States and Russia tlie most cordial 
relatbns always have existed. Russia Avas the friend of 
Ainei-ica back in the days of the beginnings of the repub- 
lic. That T'eaditional friendship has continued to this day, 
and now the two great republics find themselves allies 
ni this world wa.r, where democracy is gripped in a life 
and death strug-g'le with auTocrac.v. In this war Russia 
has tlnis far played a g:reat ])art. Whatever may be the 
outcome of the present German drive into Russian terri- 
tory, it is but common justice to Russia to say that it M'as 
the pressure exerted by her on Germany's eastern front that 
enabled France and Great Britain to build up the great 
armies that now hold the western front. Russia may have 
her military reverses but we know it is due to no lack of 
valor, but rather to shortagfe of munitions and to influ- 
ences that ai-c most difficult to (-(mibat. 

20 



AMERICA KEEPS FAITH 21 

So America keeps her faith to Russia. She welcomes 
her, the youngest member, to the family of republics, and 
prays that she may fulfill her highest hopes in working 
out her destiny. 



KANSAS' FIGHTING MEN ADD NEW GLORY TO 
AMERICAN ARMS. 

From ail Address at a Union Patriotic Meeting, Caney, 
Kan., July 21, 1918. 

The manhood of America did not need to vindicate itself, 
or to show what it will do when put to the test. But none 
the less, every American thrills with pride as he thinks of 
what our soldiers have accomplished in the last three weeks 
on the firing line in France. They have taken their bap- 
tism of fire, with all the courage, the dash and stamina of 
veterans and have added new glory to American arms. 
They are true fighting men. Kansas rejoices that some of 
her sons have had the opportunity of doing their part in 
Avhat we believe to be the turning of the tide. We are proud 
of our men ' ' over there ' ' ; and in our pride will renew our 
determination to stand back of them until the end. 

Our pride in these boys will temper the keen sorrow that 
is to come when the casualty list makes known the price of 
their immortal glory. The Kansas boys who are fighting 
the Hun have gone on the holiest crusade that ever fired 
men's souls, and those who fall will fall more gloriously 
than men ever have fallen on a battlefield. He who loses 
his life in such a cause, saves it for eternity. The God who 
gave His only begotten Son to save the world, will bless and 
glorify tlie sons of Kansas who give up their lives in that 
same holy cause. 



THE NATION CALLS FOR THE SERVICE OF ALL. 

From an Address at Vcdley Fcdis, Kan., Jidy 22, 1917. 

1 am glad to be invited to come here to pay you a neigh- 
borly visit. There are two things a governor should do 
with all his might. One is to get out among Kansas folks 
and know Kansas conditions. The other is to apply this 
knowledge to the conduct of state affairs. I am doing both 
of these things as hard as I can, for I believe it isn't possi- 
ble for a man to know too much about his job, and my job 
is 400 miles long and 200 miles wide. But big as it is and 
exacting as it is in this time of war, I wish to do anything 
and everything 1 can do to help my state fulfill its duty. 

At this grave moment in the nation's history we are all 
vitally interested in one thing. This is because it con- 
cerns not only the future of Kansas, and the future of this 
country, but our verj' lives, and all there is in this world 
that is worth living' for. Tonight I am going to ask you 
to forget this fine city, your growing county, and the best 
of all states, and give your loving thought to the great 
United States by which we stand or fall as a people. These 
are days that stir the soul of every American. And you 
know and I know that first of all we are Americans. 

No matter how brave or how aggressive is our comnnin- 
ity spirit, or the affection we hold for our city, our county, 
our state ; as communities they cannot stand alone. Tt took 
a German army just about a week to wreck Belgium and 
overcome almost seven times as many people as we have 
in Kansas, and they were assembled in a territory seven 
times smaller than Kansas. There were 7 millions of those 
Belgians, the most industrious, the most tlirifty people in 
the world. Todav tlie Belgians that are not starving, are 



THE PRICE OF HEROISM 23 

(leatl. i:ii;l those that are not dying are slaves of their eoii- 
(juerors, or worse. And their offense was simply attempt- 
ing to defend the neutrality which their very conquerors 
liad guaranteed to them. 



REGULATION SHOULD NOT BE ONE-SIDED. 

From (III Address Before the National Council of Defense 
at Washington, April 3, 1918. 

I am here to say there is no class of citizens in all this 
country more loyal to the nation or more anxious to do 
everything in their power to win the war than our western 
farmers. But the government has not been entirely fair to 
them. It has guaranteed good profits to the railroads and 
to other big industries, but the farmer has been given the 
worst of it. When it came to regulating prices the millers, 
the p'.ckers, the railroads, the copper magnates, the coal 
barons and sugar kings were consulted, but the farmer has 
had a small part in this price-fixing program. 

Out West we believe that if the price of the Kansas 
farmers' wheat fnd hogs is to lie regulated, the price of 
Southern cottoji also should be regulated. We find that 
cotton has advanced in the last year from $15 to $31. The 
Kansas farmer is payiiig a good share of that increase in 
the high price he is forced to pay for all cotton goods. If 
the Western f.irmer is to have the price of his products 
regulated, it is only fair the things the farmer must buy 
should be regulated. 

Our farmers will make :io protest on the i)resent price of 
wheat if the prices of other things are fixed accordingly. 
But when they see farm implements, harness, shoes, cloth- 
ing, fuel and other necessities have gone up 100 per cent or 
more, they cannot be blamed for feeling that this regulating 
program has been a one-sided affair. Wheat today would 
bring more than $4 a bushel if on a par with the prices of 
manufactured goods. 



THIS MUST BE THE LAST WAR. 

From a Chautauqua Address, Sterling, Kan., July 25, 1917. 

Yet deeply committed to war as the whole world is at 
this moment, it takes no great prophet to discern unmis- 
takable signs of the blessed peace that is to come. These 
signs grow more frequent. While as a people we must in 
mercy strike with all our might for those rights and princi- 
ples which no American ever can or ever will or ever ought 
to surrender, we cannot tell what blessed morning the vi- 
sion of a kinder, fairer and juster world, in which Right 
only shall be Might, will dawn upon us. And then this 
black nightmare will pass into that chamber of horrors we 
call history. Even now we are forging the lock for that 
very dungeon in which we shall cage the war beast. We 
shall temper it with the strong steel of American democ- 
racy. We shall fuse it in the white hot fire of American 
patriotism. We are going to disarm this monster, war, and 
lock him up forever. 

In this darkest hour of a black night I believe this war- 
crazed, blood-soaked world is even now within reach of 
immeasurable good which shall be lasting. The close of 
this war will strike the hour for organizing among the 
great nations a federation for maintaining world peace. 
America is the one nation which can propose such a fed- 
eration atul effect its organization. We are the nation 
which best c:ni assume the leadership. We now have the 
right and we have the strength to compel it. The task is 
hopeless without us. We are in to stay until we capture 
this beast and put the chains on him. 

All patriotic Americans now favor vigorous i)rosecution 
of the war. but as soon as kaiserism and autocracy have 
been completely overthrown, I believe the people of every 
nation with America as spokesman, will demand there shall 

24 



PEACE THRU A FEDERATION OF NATIONS 25 

be permanent peace thru a federation of nations. An in- 
ternational court of justice shall judge all future contro- 
versies between the nations. Instead of wholesale murder 
of men, women and children — and worse than murder — • 
eacli nation will be required to have in readiness a national 
liolice. This police force shall be sufficient only to main- 
tain its individual character, and to support the federa- 
tion that will enforce peace and justice between all nations. 

That result, and only that result, can compensate us for 
this appalling sacrifice. It would atone for all the suffer- 
ing and wickedness which have afflicted humanity during 
these bloody years. The hand of God is in it. This glo- 
rious mission is ours and will be the outcome of our par- 
ticipation in the war. I believe this to be a war against 
war. A war against militarism. A war for a lasting and 
permanent peace. In the end a great and lasting good to 
humanity is to come out of the hell that has been let loose 
upon a once civilized world. 

This war, as nothing else could have done, has brought 
home to the people of all the earth, the criminal insanity of 
a resort to arms as a means of settling disputes between 
nations. The world has learned that war is as barbarous 
as cannibalism, that it can be as degrading and bestial in 
modern times as it was in the Dark Ages and on a much 
wider and greater scale. As a policy of modern nations 
in a Christian civilization, war no longer is thinkable. Its 
cruelty, its wickedness, its waste, its insanity, is every- 
where admitted. 

And so it is the duty of sane men to make this world 
tragedy which to many of us seems to have set back the 
clock of civilization a thousand years, the last great war 
of history. Henceforth there must and there shall be a 
rational and more humane method of settling interna- 
tional disputes. 

Our task is to keep burning one single issue into the 
general consciousness. And that is, this must be the last 
war. And that at the close of this war, the world can and 



26 TO STAKE ALL FOR PEACE 

must find some other way to settle its differences than by 
the slaughter and mutilation of men, the starving of wo- 
men and children, the uprooting of fields and plains. 1 
know we shall do it. We Kansas people will stake our all 
on such an issue. Already the good work has begun. 



THE ENEMY AT HOME. 

From an Address at the Annual Harvest Festival at 
Benedict, Kan., August 3, 1917. 

It seems to me our war problems increase faster than we 
find solutions for them. As vital as our conduct of the war 
itself, is the welfare of the people. They are the source of 
all our power as a nation. They must fight this war and 
it is inevitable they must pay for it. The whole crushing 
weight of this staggering load is upon them. Therefore, J 
hold it the sacred duty, the first and most imperative duty 
of government at this time, to save and defend the people 
from as greedy and conscienceless a horde of traitors as the 
world ever has seen. It is not the enemy abroad but the 
enemy at home which is putting the nation to the test. 

The same relentless greed which stretches its iron hand 
across the coffin to rob defenseless grief, is squeezing the 
life and heart out of the people — is sapping our national 
energy at its source. 

The steel profiteers are making it impossible for the aver- 
age farmer to buy needed machinery. I can only guess 
what they are doing to the government itself. 

The food i)rofiteers are stinting the food supply of more 
than half the homes of the nation. 

The coal profiteers threaten these homes with a winter of 
appalling suffering. 

Shoes and clothing are mounting ont of the reach of the 
people. 

It is not a time for namby-pamby discussions. We must 
find the remedy and find it quick. We must find it in a 



EXAMPLES OB^ AMERICA'S GENIUS 27 

siiper-strenoth and effectiveness of government that will 
deal powerfully, promptly and drastically with every phase 
of this national peril. 

In such disasters as the Galveston flood, the Dayton flood 
and the San Francisco earthquake, the genius of the Ameri- 
can people has risen to the emergency. I cannot believe it 
will fail this time if w^e supply the leadership. 



HUMAN HOGS IN WAR TIME. 

From a Speech at a Patriotic Meeting, Auhurn, Kan., July 

27, 1917. 

Tlie Americaji people have given their sons — strong, 
manly fellows — the pick of the nation. They will give 
their money, billions and billions of it. They will deprive 
themselves and they will suffer, but once and for all they 
will beat out the life of this bloody giant. Militarism, who 
has compelled us to take up his own weapons against him 
that we may have peace and happiness in this world. 

Deep in our hearts we are determined that while making 
these sacrifices we shall not have traitors sapping our 
strength and vigor at home. We shall not submit to being 
robbed and exploited and driven to misery and want our- 
selves by traitor-speculators who, taking advantage of this 
crisis to hold up people and government alike, would starve 
and freeze half the homes in America to pile up more dol- 
lars and dividends. These human hogs who force the prices 
of food and coal and steel higher and higher, must be 
dealt with as we would deal with any other criminal. They 
are as deadly an enemy as the kaiser and they can do us 
infinitely more harm. 

The coal situation is a scandal. The people should no 
longer tolerate it. Unless relief is obtained thousands and 
thousinids of American homes will suffer greater hard- 
ships this winter than the men in the trenches. 



28 THE SHAME OF WAR PROFITS 

The extortion in steel is greater even than in coal. Ship 
plates cost less than 1 cent a pound two years ago. Now 
they sell for 4 and 5 cents a pound. The government has 
been forced to fight these steel magnates who literally are 
wallowing in illegitimate profits. 

Flour, bacon, beef and other necessities today are costing 
our people more than consumers i)ay for them in sub- 
marine-blockaded England. 

Producer and consumer alike are robljcd l)y the manipu- 
lators of markets. 

I say these outrages must be stopped or God help those 
wlio are responsible for continuing them. 

Furthermore, the American people are resolved that the 
billions of dollars that we need for the successful prosecu- 
tion of the war, shall not all come out of the pocket of the 
poor man, nor out of the scant savings of the little homes 
all over the land. The rich man and big business shall not 
be aUowed to pass tlie heavier share of the burden onto 
them. These men of thousands and millions must pay in 
proportion as they profit from the necessities and hard- 
ships of the war. Never has big business prospered as it 
now is pros])ering. One hundred and four American cor- 
porations, engaged in manufacturing, mining and similar 
enterprises, in 1916 showed a profit of 1,278 million dol- 
lars in war "velvet" as against 263 million dollars of war 
profits in 1914. In two years their excess profits have 
increased nearly 500 per cent. This year the excess profits 
of these concfrns will be o billion dollars. This is all war 
"velvet"— all dnc 1o the war. 

Doesn't common decency suggest these huge profits be 
turned over to the government? Secretary McAdoo has 
just told Congress that 5 more billions will be needed for 
war expenses this year, making 14 billion dollars for war 
the first year. Is there as much money in the world? 
Most of these 14 billions will be spent right here and big 
Vuisiness will get it. 



TWO PRIMARY PROFITS • 29 

If the big' business concerns of this country are taxed as 
they should be taxed upon their excess profits, at the same' 
rate as corporations are taxed in England, Uncle Sam 
would be able to meet the gigantic expenses of the war 
without laying a heavy hand upon the small business man, 
the farmer, the clerk and the laborer. If this sane and just 
method of taxation is employed, Congress won't be asked 
to vote "with its eyes shut" for a poorly-devised revenue 
bill. If excess profits are taxed for war revenue, business 
may continue as usual and our people will suffer no un- 
necessary hardships. But if big business escapes its share 
of taxation and is permitted to go on rolling up these tre- 
mendous profits at the expense of the government and the 
people, a long continuance of the war will result in such 
riots aud disorders in this country as we have never known. 
It may even involve big business in the wreck. 

My friends, preventing the exploiting of the people by 
disloyal, greedy men and combinations of men ; and pro- 
viding a fair and honest apportionment of war taxation, 
are the two fundamental problems of this war. They are 
as vitally important as the war itself. These two great 
fundamental problems must be solved. They must be 
solved correctly and justly in the interest of the whole 
people, or we shall be tried as we have never been tried 
before. The people must earnestly insist and vigorously 
demand a fair war tax bill. They must stand for their 
rights. They must stand for the highest good of the whole 
country, or suffer deeply for their apathy and neglect. 



THE GOVERNMENT MUST BE HONEST WITH 
THE PEOPLE. 

From a Speech at a Patriotic Meeting at Ottawa, Kan., 
July 1, 1917. 

Rit>litly or wrongly, one or two recent appointments at 
AVasliington in connection with the expenditures of the 
coiuitry's huge war funds, have aroused widespread public 
distrust. I feel it myself, and I meet it everywhere. Latei' 
events may or may not justify the public's suspicions. But 
it is admittedly a bad policy to appoint stock exchange 
gamblers to positions of great trust Avhere we should have 
men of the highest standing. 

Every great public emergency offers unusual opportuni- 
ties for the grafter. The people know we have never had 
wars that we have not had swarms of grafters. Men of 
this kind are willing to enrich themselves at the expense 
of their country, if not at the expense of their country's 
blood. 

We may take it for granted that sooner or later, if it 
has not already happened, the enormous sums contributed 
to this war by the people will excite the criminal cupidity 
of such men. 

This i)robal)ility should and does make the people ex- 
tremely watchful and suspicicms. 

P>iit the government can turn this situation into a great 
source of strength if it will. 

T am hoping when any misdoing or traitorous tliieving is 
di.scovered. that the government will fully and promptly 
let the peoi)le know the facts. I am hoping the govern- 
ment will be absolutely square and above board with the 
people, no matter who or what department of the govern- 
ment the truth and the whole truth, may "hurt." 

m 



FRANKNESS WITH THE PUBLIC NECESSARY 31 

Such a frank and open course will have a wonderful 
effect in strengthening the government in the confidence 
and esteem of the people. The whole nation will react to 
it. The President will find that the country will be Avon- 
derfuUy more responsive to all calls for team work or fof 
assistance of any kind, if only the government will keep 
faith with the people. 

For the rest, I hope an early example will be made Qf 
the first grafter caught. The punishment should be prompt 
and severe. 

I can imagine no more despicable a crime than to cheat 
as well as betray your country in time of war. The fate 
of the first man caught doing it in this war should strike 
terror into the cowardly hearts of all who are like him, and 
the next offender should get as much of the same kind, if 
not more of it. 

A few examples would have tremendous effect. Every 
l)ig and little grafter would fear, and with reason, that the 
watch fid eye of the government was also upon him. That 
it \\ould be his turn next to undergo punishment and be 
held up to public scorn and contempt by pitiless publicity 
in the press of the nation. 

Nothing would go further toward reassuring the p\d)lic. 
Tt Avould know it had an honest government. It would 
know that no one at Washington was trying to cover up the 
misdeeds of any treacherous and unworthy servant, nor 
trying to hide or excuse mistakes or errors of judgment. 

No government, especially no American government, need 
fear to be absolutely square with the people. If the peo- 
ple believe the government is right at heart, they will back 
it to the limit. 

I liope Washington will follow the Kansas custom. That 
it will learn to take its medicine when it needs it, and that 
it will promptly kick out every rascal and scorch him with 
its contempt and its scorn. 



HOW WE VAN HELP WIN THE WAR. 

From (I Patriotic Address at Baptist Church, Armourdale, 
Kan., July 31, J9]7. 

What can we do to lielp sliorton the war by winning it? 

We home folks can volunteer, aiid we must. This means 
that every one of us must of his owai volition do his part 
faithfully and willingly and without waiting to be asked. 
I tliink we will. I haven't yet found a slacker in Kansas. 

Let me tell you that man for man and woman for woman, 
as mucli if not more actually depends on our efforts as upon 
the soldiers in the field. 

Just think a moment. Notwithstanding the huge armies 
that will be raised, not more than 5 per cent of the popula- 
tion will be called to arms. That leaves not less than 95 
per cent of us at home. It is our task to keep the altars of 
patriotism burning brightly, and home and state and na- 
tional resources up to top-notch and in constant readiness 
for every national need. 

We shall have to do our daily and hourly tasks a little 
more diligently, a little more efficiently, for now we not 
onl}^ have our own work to do, but also the work of those 
who are absent. And we shall be called on to do even more 
than this, for war is the greatest of wasters. 

We cini accomplish these things only thi'u system aiul 
pl.uniing and thi'u sensible, not hysterical, economizing of 
time, labor, material, food. 

We must make every effort count. 

Wc imist keep onrselves fit, just as tlic soldier must keep 
fit. 

We must prevent waste of every kind. 

Every slice of bread or piece of meat or ounce of sugar 
that can be saved will help to win. The government urges 
us to turn from the use of foods which can easily be trans- 

H2 



THP] SIMPLE LIFE L\ WARTLME 33 

ported to Eiu'oi)e and which are so sadly needed, to support 
the wai". It asks us to substitute for our own use other 
foods which are more abundant and which cannot be trans- 
ported. Even families which already are practicing the 
strictest economy, even the careful housewife who never 
wastes anything, can help by changing- the bill of fare and 
using wheat and meat and sugar as sparingly as possible. 

In my own home where strict economy may not be abso- 
lutely ]iecessary, we are trying to comply with this recpiest, 
because it is a part of the government program. My good 
wife feels we must all work together in doing what the 
government asks; and that the Food Administrator's rules 
are meant as much for governors as for anyone else. It is 
only by united effort we can win ; so I find that we have at 
our house wheatless days and meatless days ; and on other 
days the slices of bread are a little thinner, and we have 
small i^ortions of bacon and beef. Mrs. Capper is feeding 
me on Kansas cornbread and Kaw Valley potatoes and a 
variety of Kansas grown vegetables, and I find that I am 
getting fat. I have gained a pound and a half in the last 
six weeks. 

AVe all can talk as well as practice food producing and 
saving, for it is well to keep this important matter contin- 
ually before our attention. 

We can plan simpler dressing, simpler social life, simpler 
living, yet live just as well, and conserve our health and 
resources for other demands that will be made upon us. 

We can ami must lend our personal and willing assist- 
ance to every state and connnunity activity for carrying on 
the war and strengthening our resources. 



PATKI()Tls:\r OF KANSAS" FOREIGN BORN. 

Frimi (III A(ldrfs.'< at the Surdish Lutheran Rally, Axtell, 
Kan., July 20, 1916. 

Kansas is cosinopolitaii and glad of it. Kansas is a 
product of the melting' pot and admits it with pride and 
satisfaction. It has 115,266 citizens of foreign birth, every 
one a good citizen, the best ever. Uncle Sam has no better 
children. I wish he had more just like them. 

They came to us from every country in Europe : From 
Germany we have 28,807 ; from Sweden, Norway and Den- 
mark 14,818; from France 2,170; from Russia 14,620; from 
Great Britain 19,279 ; from the south of Europe 17,076. 

Xo one in Kansas doubts their Americanism any more 
than he doubts liis ow)i. They and their children own more 
of Kansis than any otlier like mimber of citizens. We have 
no finer, more useful, more law-abiding, God-fearing people. 

Tliey came here with little. But they have been thrifty, 
honest and industrious. Now they are property owners, 
famous farmers, home builders, school and church builders, 
bank depositors, taxpayers. Never tax dodgers. 

In thrift and industry, in whatever they undertake, they 
have set us all a luost elo(pient and striking example of per- 
sistent, intelligent, successful endeavor. Their family and 
j'eligious life is nearly ideal. Their children are carefully 
reai-(>d and invai-iably well educated. They produce no 
loafers, )io physic il oi- moral weaklings. Their contribu- 
tion to the criminal class is the smallest. 

IIow can anyone doubt the pati'iotism of such citizens? 
They live it! 

Tliat they should not look with strong sentimental in- 
t<'res1. partisanship and gi'ief at the titanic struggle in their 
native 1 nds would be to denunid more of them than flesh 
and blood and he -rt and soul can deliver. This very thing 

?A 



ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE IMMIGRANT 35 

testifies io the liijiii ([uality of the loyalty they bear to and 
would manifesl if need be to the nation they have made 
their own. 

Our Russian 3leinionites first j^'ave Kansas world-fame as 
the chief producer in quality and ([uantity of the worbi's 
best bread-makinji' wheat. 

Our Swedish and Norwegian settlers have built up a great 
center of Scandinavian learning and culture at Lindsborg, 
famous all over America for its nnisical festivals. 

As far back as the earliest history of Kansas, during the 
border war for human freedom that preceded the Civil war, 
and in that greater conflict, our citizens of German birth 
and those from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, marched 
shoulder to shoulder with the American born and })ledged 
their lives as freely, as frequently, as gladly and as unques- 
tioningly, as we did, that the nation might live and be free. 

How can anyone doubt the loyalty of these citizens to the 
home and country they have made their very own? 

In Kansas we do not ajid we never have. We concede to 
them an Americanism as strong and deep and true and 
virile as our own. Our flag is their flag and ever will be. 
It is their flag as much as it is ours. They have toiled or 
shed their blood for it and they will defend it just as 
devote llv in time of trial or need. 



FOR AN AGGRESSIVE WAR POLICY. 

From (III Address at El Dorado, Kan., August 8, 1917. 

You know I am not a war-like man. I stood out against 
war as long as there was a possibility of honorably avoid- 
ing it. Now we are at war I am for unity of action, for 
exerting the full and undivided strength of the luition. 
The stronger and more aggressive the policy at Washing- 
ton, the sooner we shall have peace. 

A united front and no faltering, is the (piickest way for 
us to end the war. It will do more to save lives and lighten 



36 THE IIO.MK BACKGROUND 

war burdens than any other, or all other eourses. To do 
aiiytliing else will be at the cost of bloody sacrifices. The 
thing for us to do now is to strengthen the arm of the gov- 
ernment in every possible way. We should work and pray 
for united action. Argument and bickering, or holding 
back simply amounts to aiding the enemy, when the whole 
strength of the nation must be exerted to bring this war to 
an end in the only way it can be ended. To accomplish this 
result, everyone must make this his war. 

1 a?u not alone in the opinion that the two most powerful 
weapons in our hands are food and wealtli. Tn tliese re- 
sources our position is impregnable. I believe America 
tiloiie could stand a siege against the whole world. Rut 
such a war would last for generations and bring ruin aiul 
('esolation to evei-y home in the land. 

Our own resources are sufficient for our needs at this 
hour, but the demand of the ally nations for food is so 
urgent, that every resource we have must be strained to 
meet it, for by meeting it promptly. and generously we shall 
do most to end the war and shall save American lives that 
otiierwise must be lost in the trenches. 

At the same time, whether we use it or not. we must train 
and make ready a great army. Possibly tiie larger part of 
it nuiy never leave these sliores. That depends on how well 
and how promptly we supply the present needs of our war- 
worn allies on tlie fighting line. In eitlier case we must 
have men and arms ready. We must be read}' not only for 
every contingency of this war, but we nnist be aggressively 
ready, more tlian ready for whatever happens or transpires. 
At tliis moment with sons and fathers leaving for the 
camps, and otlici- sons and fathers soon to follow, our 
natural human feelings have the ui)perhand. but it is my 
e i-nest conviction at this stage of the great world struggle, 
that anything short of mobilizing the full strength of the 
nation is the most jiei'ilous course for tliem as well as for us 
on wlu)m l])e duty now falls to sui)poi't them promptly and 
a(]('(|na1('Iy in cam]) and field. TiCt us ti'ust in God's good- 



WORK, WORK, WORK 37 

ness and mercy. Let us face the future courageously — and 
^\•ork, work, work. 

We must back up those boys whose lives now are pledged 
to our defense, back them up at every turn of the road. 
We have everj^thing to gain by strong vigorous action. 
Nothing else is to be thought of. It is for us left at home 
hiWy to realize that the duration of the war depends on 
our efforts. Let us go to work with a will to win it as 
quickly and as bloodlessly as possible. 



COME BACK NOBLER MEN. 

From an Address to Officers' Training Camp, Fort Riley, 
AiKjust 9, 1917. 

I come liere to bring you a message of appreciation and 
good wishes from the people of Kansas. I congratulate you 
on the splendid showing you have made today as the result 
of three months' intensive training under Colonel Rivers. 
Tliere is not the slightest doubt in my mind that you will 
do your part in a glorious way. 

I did not come here to bring you advice. Let me make 
just this one suggestion, however: You need no sermon to 
remind you that a system shattered by alcohol or by the 
disease of vice cannot render adequate service. The man 
who fails to take care of himself — as he only can care for 
himself by living a clean, decent life — is shirking his work 
in his company — is deserting his companion — is as much 
of a slacker as the coward who hides out. He becomes an 
object of pity and loathing. 

War, more than any other activity of life, brings out the 
true inwardness of man. It shows men at their true worth. 
You who are here today will come back to Kansas after you 
liavc done your work. You will come back to a people that 
will welcome you as heroes. Kansas and America have 
never been niggardly in their treatment of veterans. Places 
of honor and trust will be open to you ; 3'ou will have been 



38 TRIED IN THE FIRE 

tried in tlie fire and tlie world will expect you to eoiue out 
l)nre jrold. God grant that not one of you may fail in that 
test. Your mothers, your wives, your sweethearts and your 
fellowmen whose good opinion you value and covet, will be 
waiting for bigger, better, nobler men than you are today. 
And I know, men, that you will not disappoint them. Go 
with brave hearts and high ideals; come back with honor 
and clean hands. 



PATRIOTISM AND PROFITS. 

Froiu an Address at Annmd Fall Festival at LeRofi, Ka)i.. 
August 10, 1917. 

I understand there has been great concern back East 
about "the attitude of the common people out West"' 
toward the war. They were afraid we wouldn't understaiul 
it nor appreciate its terrible significance. 

I confess it was difficult for the most of us to l)elievc war 
l)0ssible. But we got awake in time to send a good big- 
bunch of our sons to the army and the navy before the 
draft ; we realized the significance of war enough to raise 
a good many thousands of dollars for the Red Cross work 
and the war Y. M. ('. A., and we are preparing to grow the 
biggest crop of food the state has ever seen.. 

^Ve believe out here in the West that war is the most 
serious thing in the world. 

We believe that war cannot be a half-hearted thing — that 
when a nation goes into it, it goes the whole way — not half 
way. 

We believe that we must ]mt into it every ]iower of the 
nation -not j)art of our power. 

And we believe that that means money-power as well as 
man-power. 

We see Uncle Sam tui-n to the man-i)ower on the farms, 
in the shops, in the stores and in the mines of the nation, 
and say in the first year of the war, to 2 million of the pick 



''CAPITAL IS TIMID" 39 

of his sous, "i wiuit you to leave your busiuess, your liome, 
your family — give up all your earning power and come 
woi'k in this holy cause. I will lose many of you. Many of 
you will never return, but tins is your duty ; you are a 
poltroon, a slacker, a coward, if you flinch!" 

And more than a million and a half of the youth of the 
land liavc cheerfully and loyally answered that call, laying 
their lives and their fortunes upon their country's altar. 

And then Uncle Sam turns from the man-power of the 
nation to its other power — the money-power, and what do 
we see ? 

Does lie say, "Here, ]\Ir. Millions, I want you to give all 
— tq risk your life for youi- country's good?" That's what 
he s tys, and rightly says, to the young men of the nation. 
But does he say that to Money? He does not. 

He has lieard for years that "Capital is timid," which is 
another way of saying that most capitalists are cowards — 
are "sure thing" gamblers. 

He doesn "t attempt to draft capital ; that would be con- 
fiscation, and while it's all right to draft a human life, 
ca})ital is too sacred for that. 

So liie ])eople of the nation, thru Uncle Sam, are not 
asking anythiiig so revolutionary as treating billions the 
same way we treat boys. "We don't ask capital to give itself 
as the boys do ; we only ask that it give up a part of its 
excess earnings. Tliat's all. 

We are saying to capital, "Here, my son, this war which 
is so horrible to the rest of us has brought you wealth 
beyond your wildest dreams. You don't know Avhat to do 
with yoiir income. One cori)oration alone made more money 
last year — more net profit — than all the farmers of Kansas 
l)ut together liave ever made in three or four years. Won't 
yon ])lease let us take a little of the excess profit you are 
making out of the war, to help pay for the war? That's a 
good fellow, now. Don't be a slacker, sonny." 

That 's all we are asking of capital in the income tax and 
the excess profit tax ; and to most reasonable persons it 



40 LIFE MORE SACRED THAN MONEY 

would seem fair cnouyh. r>ut not to capital. No, the cus- 
todiaiis of wealth can't see it that way; they are movin<r 
heaven and earth and Congress in an effort to escape any 
snch arranu'cment. They say: 

"it's all rig'ht to sacrifice the boys. That's patriotism 
;uid it's a great thing to encourage patriotism. But capital 
must not be disturbed. Don't tax it; we'll show you a 
better way tluui that, Uncle Sam. Just write out your note 
of hand for a few billion dollars every month or so, at a 
goo 1 rate of interest, and we'll let you have all the money 
you want. And your ])eople can take the next fifty years 
1o i)ay off the debt. It will give your boys something to 
think about and something to work for when they get back 
from the war, if they ever do get back.'' 

I may mistake the American people, but I don't believe 
they will ever assent to that arrangement. We have iio 
contempt for money out here in the West; but we don't 
place a higher value upon it than we place upon our boys. 
]\lost of us would rather sacrifice our fortmies than our 
boys; at least we want the boy to have an even break: and 
in til is terrible business we ask that the nation make at lea.st 
as great a demand ujion money as u]>on them. T^se all the 
j)owers of the nation, Cncle Sam. 

The 2 million uieii who will be undei* ai'ms by the first of 
the year, are giving u]) all chance of nmking big })rot'its out 
of the war. They will pile up no swollen fortunes. We ask 
that the stay-at-homes forego that opportunity too. We ask 
that they be restrained from exploiting the public and from 
gouging Uncle Sam, and that all the profits of big business 
above normal j)i'ofits, and that all swollen incomes above a 
very re;;sonable amount, be ])laced at the disj)()sal of the 
government along side of the lives of our young men. And 
it is little enough we ask. It is only justice. 

But aside from the justice of the case, business, short- 
sighted and timid as it proverbially is, ought to be able to 
see the handica]) that will be placed upon this nation by the 
piling up of billions and billions of botuled indebtedness. 



LUXURIES MUST GO 41 

Tlu' war will not last forever and the after-the-war prob- 
lems are as serious as the w^ar itself. If we do the best we 
call, raise every dollar possible by taxation, we still shall 
emerge from the war with a debt that staggers the imagina- 
tion. If we are not to devote the entire energies of the next 
fifty years to tlie payment of that debt, w^hile all progress 
stands still, we must bend every energy now to "paying as 
we go," even if a few of our favored sons are compelled to 
give np a few luxuries in war times. 



THE SUPREME DUTY OP EVERY MAN. 

F !•(,})} an Address to the Evangelical Alliance, Lawrence, 
Kan., August 11, 1917. 

It is a peeuliar trick of Fate that a man with such pro- 
nounced peace tendencies as I have, should be your gov- 
ernor at a time when we are entering upon the greatest war 
of history. But now that we are in the war, there is no 
time for any American — especially any man who has been 
entrusted with public office — to think about his personal 
opinions. We have passed that stage. The one plain duty 
of ev^'ry individual is to give his supremest efforts to the 
cause in which we are engaged. The man vs^ho falters — 
who stops now to whine about what might have been — is 
disloyal. 

I have from the first taken my office seriously. I have 
felt its responsibilities. But all that has gone before is as 
nothing compared with the responsibility w^hich now rests 
upon me as your chief executive officer in seeing that this 
state and this people do their full share in the gigantic task 
before us. Kansas is willing. We are not slackers; we 
want to serve the nation and the cause of democracy in the 
world. But it is so easy to go wrong. The governor's part 
has become a 24-hour-a-day job. Because the length of the 
war ; the toll of human life and treasure which will be 



42 PROTECT THE PRODUCER 

taken ; and indeed our ultimate triumph depends so lar<i:ely 
ui)on what we do now, we must get the right start and that 
means an early start and vigorously sustained effort to the 
end. United action we must have. 



DON'T HAMPER THE PRODUCER. 

From an Address at the Old Settlers' Reunion at Frank- 
fort, Kan., September 20, 1917. 

We are in front of a mighty big job in Kansas — the 
biggest job undertaken by any state since time began. It 
depends upon us more than upon any other state to keep an 
eml)attled world from starving during the next two years. 
In my opinion we shall need every ounce of man-power 
we've got in Kansas and the use of every tillable acre. 

A great deal of thovight has been spent on safeguarding 
the consumer from the greediest band of cut-throats that 
ever cursed a nation. Of course we must protect our wage- 
earners. But what is vastly more important just now, we 
must first insure raising and harvesting the stuff. The 
great big thing still is to stimulate production in every 
possible way. 

For weeks and months I have been doing my utmost to 
])resent this side of the case to the President and Congress. 
I have talked it everywhere. I have made the facts known 
in all my papers. To all comers I have said, the world's 
savior in this emergency must be the producer; the ])ro- 
ducer is the foremost man you must consider. 

But Washington's duty doesn't end here. It must guard 
us from extortionate prices for farming implements, for 
binder twine, for all the necessities of the farming business. 
We must in no way cripple or hamper the only man who 
can save us from a world disaster. It must be easily pos- 
sible for him to buy the implements he needs, especially 
every labor-saving tool. 



NOT SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE 43 

Tf we can't have a little of this kind of patriotism higher 
up. by all means let Washington draft it. If it can draft 
YivoH it can draft property and it can limit fat dividends. 



KANSAS' PRIDE IN HER FIGHTING MEN. 

From an Address at the Farewell Reception to Kansas 
National Guardsmen at Kansas City, Kan., September 
3, J9J7. 

Major Hunt and iMen of the Kansas National Guard: 

You have left your peaceful pursuits, "your mirth and 
your employment" to answer your country's call, tQ give 
yonr strong young manhood to the nation's need. I bid you 
God-speed. 

You are not setting forth on a holiday jaunt. War is no 
picnic. It is a man's job. 

The war came to America, slowly and gradually but with 
all the inevitableness of Fate ; we bided our time with 
infinite ])atience and sometimes it seemed with infinite in- 
difference, but when the hour struck it found you ready— 
v.nd ready without any fireworks, with no bombast, no 
mock heroics. I do not think of you as having any false 
ideas about the romance of war; the glamor of war has nr>+ 
deceived you. 

To me you are not soldiers of fortune who buckle on the 
sword and sally forth seeking adventure. Instead you seem 
to me to be sober-miiuled young men who realize that war j" 
a serious business, a most regrettable business that tt. 
greed and selfishness and ignorance and stupid muddling in 
general has slopped over for a final cleaning up in a cen- 
tury where it does not belong. It is a disgrace to civiliza- 
tion ; a crime — the worst of all crimes before God and man, 
but it's here, and it brings with it a dirty piece of work 
which must be done and you have set your teeth and are 
going to do it. It is part of your day's work and you are 
!iot going to shirk it. 



44 THE FINAL OVERTHROW OF WAR 

It is a great thing to live in and to be a part of an age 
that does an epoch-making thing. Prophecy is a foolish 
thing but I believe that the second decade of the 20th cen- 
tury will be remembered for thousands of years, not for its 
marvelous inventions; not for its progress in science, but 
because of the final overthrow of war among men. It is for 
that reason and for that purpose that you are here ; to 
banish from the earth forever the horrible trade you are 
learning. 

I am not going to load you up with a lot of unasked-for 
advice. I notice that you are getting plenty of that; almost 
as much as the farmers or newspaper men. Bvit I do want 
to congratulate you upon Avhat the world has learned in the 
last few years about taking care of its soldiers. 

While science has brought many Avonderful and diabolic 
things to war, we have learned to protect you from the 
greed and avarice of the human harpies who fed your 
fathers and some of you, embalmed beef and other culinary 
abominations. 

We have learned to protect you from typhoid and malaria 
and yellow fever and the plague. 

We have learned how to look after your comfort and 
moreover have learned that looking after your comfort pays. 

But most important of all we have learned to protect our 
defenders from liquor and vice, from tlie booze-seller and 
the immoral woman. War has slain its thousands in the 
past generations ; but war 's wretched camp-followers. Im- 
morality and Drunkenness, have slain their millions. 

From these horrors it is the high purpose of your Com- 
mander-in-Chief, your officers and the American people to 
protect you. The word has gone forth that the camps of the 
American soldiers must be clean and decent and I thank 
God that the officers of the army, even some of those who 
might have thought clean living an impossibility, are mak- 
ing every effort to see that the order is obeyed in letter and 
in spirit. 



LOYALTY OF THE FOREIGN BORN. 

From an Address Delivered at the Grand Opera House, 
Topeka, Kan., in Furtherance of the Third Liberty Loan, 
on the Occasion of the Visit of Governor Simon Bam- 
berger of Utah, April 24, 1918. 

It gives me unusual pleasure to introduce to you our dis- 
tinji'uished guest and my good friend, Governor Simon 
Bamberger, of the sister state of Utah. It affords me occa- 
sion to say something about a subject to which many of us 
have given too little attention. Most of us have been quick 
to detect and to denounce the citizen of foreign birth, who 
has not been 100 per cent pure in his Americanism. We 
have been quick to charge disloyalty against foreign born 
citizens who have wavered in their allegiance to this gov- 
ernment, and rightly so. But too many of us have failed to 
appreciate that the citizen of foreign birth who is not loyal 
to our government is in a decided minority among foreign 
born citizens. The truth is that the vast majority of our 
foreign born are as ardent in their patriotism, as devoted 
in their loyalty, as ready to make the needed sacrifices for 
the successful prosecution of the war as any citizen of 
American birth. It is one of this type of citizens who is 
with us tonight and whom we are delighted to honor. 

Simon Bamberger was born in Prussia. He came to this 
country, a poor emigrant lad, at the age of 14. He is now 
a rich man and the governor of his state, and there is not a 
more loyal citizen of the United States nor a more ardent 
patriot in Utah than this same Simon Bamberger. He 
knows the debt of the citizen to his country, because he 
recognizes and is quick to acknowledge publicly and pri- 
vately that all he is and has and hopes to be he owes to the 

45 



46 A PREACHER OF AMERTCAXISM 

laud of his adoption. Because lie knows this so well he has 
fxonv all about this country preaching this doctrine and tell- 
ing other citizens of foreign birth to get into this fight with 
all tlieir might and back up Uncle Sam with their influence, 
their wealth and their lives, to the very finish. America 
takes pride in her Simon Rambergers. 



THE CALL FOR SERVICE FINDS KANSAS BUSY. 

From (in Address Before the National Council of Defense 
(it W(ishin(jton, April 3, 1918. 

Kansas' citizens will go ahead sturdily, confidently, pa- 
ti'iotically in this trying time with the tasks assigned them 
in field or factory, producing to the limit, sacrificing where 
sacrifice is needed for the country's good, adjusting them- 
selves to new and strange conditions, overcoming difficul- 
ties courageously as difficulties appear, and giving liberally 
and cheerfully of their possessions to the common fund, if 
the giving contributes to victory. 

Happily Kans;s peoj)le have retained much of the early 
simplicity of living inevitable in an agricultural state, so 
that now when self-denial is demanded they have to re- 
nounce few extravagances, but turn readily to the common- 
sense frugality and thi'ift so essential to a nation at war. 

I could not be a true citizen of Kansas and doubt for one 
moment that in lf)lS we shall present to the national ad- 
ministration a community of interest, of ideals, of patriotic 
ambitions and of notable achievements to the end that our 
state may live in the nation's history as one that did inore 
than its share when the call came for service. In men, in 
money, in food, Kansas will prove itself a mighty base of 
supplies. There are no drones out there. 



PROTECT SOLDIERS FROM VICE. 

FroDi <nt Address at the Sylvia, Kan., Chautauqua, 
August 4, 1917. 

Will' at the best brings in its train horrors and misery and 
woe. It is the culmination of human disaster. It calls for 
sacrifices of blood and of treasure, and there is no escape 
from its call. We cannot evade its penalties. AVe must pay 
with the very life's blood of the country; with the mother's 
tears; with the cries of desolate orphans. But there is one 
sacrifice which need not be made ; one penalty which need 
not be paid. From time immemorial society has counten- 
anced a laxity of morals in camp life which would not for 
an instant be sanctioneci in civil life. For too long have we 
taken it for granted that the soldier "must have his fling" 
— with the result that unscrupulous men and unholy 
women, cami) followers, the ragtag of civilization, have 
preyed upon young manhood, stripping our fairest youth 
of honor, besmirching and befouling them and leaving them 
physical, mental and spiritual wrecks. This is a sacrifice 
which need not be made ; this is one penalty which need not 
be paid ; for God granting the power, the voice of American 
womanhood shall be heard and the camps wherein a million 
American youths will be concentrated shall be kept clean, 
free from liquor and free from vice. 

It is a tremendous sacrifice that the American nation is 
r.sking of its mothers. Thru the President we are telling 
the women of this land that they must give their sous and 
their husbands, their brothers and their sweethearts, a sac- 
rifice to the cause of liberty thruout the world. We say to 
them, "It is not for you to ask why; it is not for you to 
nnirmur or complain ; it is your part to give cheerfully and 

47 



48 NOT A SENTIMENTAL QUESTION 

loyall\', as woinanliood has given and lias sacrificed since 
the dawn of time.*" If we luake such demands, in God's 
name, shall we not <:ive to these noble women a guarantee 
that their boys who esc.ipe the hell of battle shall come back 
to them as cle.'.n. as ])ure, as wholesome as when they left? 
Shall we not say to them that their loved ones shall be pro- 
tected from the harpies who would ruin both body and 
sou! ? I say to you that the American government shall 
give them that gu irantee and, God helj)ing us. the guar- 
antee shall be made good! 

This, my friends, is not a sentimental question. It is not 
solely a moral (pu'stion. Sentiment and morals and decency 
aside, only plain ('o)nmon sense is needed to understand 
that an efficient soldier, the man who is able to stand the 
test to which Hie modei'u soldier is put, must be a man of 
tlie highest physical cai)acity, with a clear head, a steady 
nerve and moral as well as physical courage; and this the 
alcohol-soaked, disease-ridden, degenerate victim of vice 
can never be. Even if we care nothing for the pleas and 
pi-ayei's of mothers we must have clean soldiers. 

With others I have urged upon the President and upon 
the Secretaries of War and of the Navy, that every possible 
I'cstriction be i)laced around the military training camps 
and cantonments; and I am happy to say that there is evi- 
dence that the horrors attending camp life in previous wars 
will not be repeated in li)17. Both Secretary Daniels and 
Seci-etaiy Baker, T believe, are earnestly endeavoring to 
keep camp life clean. I have personally' visited both Fort 
Riley and Fort Leavenworth and appealed to the Com- 
iiiinders to do all in tlieir power to eliminate innnorality 
and intemperance. The Commanders at both encamjiments 
are fully alive to the res])onsibilities resting U])on them. 
They have a.ssui'ed me that they are faithfully and con- 
scientiously enfoi-ring the military regidations against 
drunkenness and vice. I have }>ersonally urged those in 
('(tminand of our Kansas regiments to leave nothing undone 
for the pi'otection of our own boys, and I know they will do 



AN ARMY MORALLY CLEAN 49 

IT. I believe tlie vigilance of the right-thinking' Christian 
men and women of this nation has borne frnit and that the 
morals of the American army will be kept cleaner than that 
of an}^ other army on which the sun ever shone. 



THE WAY TO GET OUT IS TO FIGHT OUT. 

From an Address by Governor Capper in Introducing 
Major General Leonard Wood at the Food Conservation 
Congress at Wichita, Kan., October 9, 1917. 

The only way to get out of this war is to fight our way 
out. We nuist stay in until the war is won. We have no 
sympathy for those who block progress. Our sympathy is 
with only one side — that of the United States and our 
Allies. Every loyal Kansan and patriotic American will get 
on that side. The man who can't be loyal, thru and thru, 
should pack his trunk and pull out for the kaiser's country. 

The President has great responsibilities. We should lay 
aside all politics at this time and remember that we are 
all Americans. I believe we Kansans are 100 per cent 
Americans. 

We could not honorably keep out of this war. We stood 
for the insults of the kaiser and his military machine as 
long as possible. It became necessary for us to entar the 
war to maintain our right to live as free men should liv^e 
and not to do homage to some foreign power and livi as x 
military autocrat would have us live. 

Aaid now that we are in this w^ar, it gives us strengt/i a; id 
confidence in the outcome to have as one of our command- 
ing officers such a thoro going American as Major General 
Wood. It was the foresight of General Wood that gave us 
the great officers' training camps that are so rapidly sup- 
])lying our army with trained and skilled officers. The 
Plattsburg camp, on which the present officers' training 
ciimp was modeled, was conceived and carried into effect by 



50 FORESIGHT OF THE TRAINING CAMPS 

General Wood and without that example the problem of 
devising and forming these great, successful training camps 
for officers would have been much more difficult of solu- 
tion, and our preparation for the conflict would have been 
much delayed. I have made several visits to Camp Funston 
and let me assure you every Kansan has reason to feel proud 
of the wonderful work General Wood has done. He has the 
aggressive spirit of a true Kansan and I am sure you will 
heartily approve when I tell you that as chief executive of 
the state I have commissioned General Wood "Citizen Ex- 
traordinarv of the State of Kansas." 



AMERICA MAKES WAR ON MILITARISxM. 

From an Address to the Aiinual Convention of the 
I. 0. 0. F., Florence, Kan., October .?. 7.9/7. 

When before this has there ever been a war for which so 
many apologies were made ? When before has there been a 
war so needless, that no one would accept the responsibility 
for it? AVhen before, a war in whicli kings and chancellors 
liavo ])ointed at each other and cried, "He began it! My 
hands are clean ! I am innocent of this black crime agaiiist 
maidvind ! T acted only in self defense?" 

You know and I know that the American nation for 
nearly tliree years was a neutral looker-on. The American 
people endeavored to be fair and impartial in their judg- 
ment — unmoved by rancor, untainted by prejudice. And 
we liave decided that we know where the responsibility for 
the greatest tragedy of human history lies. We know what 
the verdict of history will be. Denials, forgeries, diplomatic 
lies will not change the verdict. 

The appalling nightmare of rapine and murder which the 
I'l-nssian kaiser has brought upon the world, is the direct 
and logical result of forty years' deliberate and constant 
preparation. Bismarck laid the plans M'ith devilish cun- 
ning. He sowed the dragon's teeth. Time ripened the 



MAKING ALL THE WORLD SAFE 51 

seed, and tlie kaist-r was carefully reared to reap the harvest 
of death and disaster that the spirit of militarism always 
has sown. 

America wished to ket p out of the war. The administra- 
tion at Washington watched and waited, and waited and 
watched. The people were loth to plunge into it. We 
prayed night and day that the bitter cup might pass from 
us. But this was not to be. The government at Washing- 
ton considered our participation inevitable if the world was 
not to be turned over to absolute militarism ; if the clock of 
civilization was not to be turned back a thousand years and 
all the liberties that mankind had won, thru long centuries, 
were not to be wiped out in a night. The fate of mankind 
was at stake and we took part in the titanic struggle. 

But let there be no mistaking of our purpose. Not for 
glory ; not for territory ; not for commercial gain, do we go 
to war. For America — and we believe for the Allies with 
whom we fight — tliis is a war against war. It is a fight to 
the death against the spirit of militarism. It must put an 
eternal ban on the profession of murder, on armies trained 
to murder, on professional war makers. It must abolish 
forever the world old idea tluxt Might makes Right. It must 
do to the bully among nations what .civil law does to the 
bully among men. It must put an end to gun-toting by gov- 
ernments. It must teach the czars and emperors of the 
Eastern continent and the would-be autocrats of the West- 
ern hemisphere, that mankind has advanced since the Stone 
Age and that brute force no longer may rule the world. It 
must drive home to all peoples the truth that they who take 
the sword shall perish by the sword. It shall usher in the 
day when war sliall be no more. 

We must not be persuaded that this war, as some will try 
to persuade us, is a divine call to establish militarism in 
this country. Our one excuse for taking up arms now is to 
make the world safe — not from the kaiser and liis hordes 
alone, but from the spirit which animates and created them. 



52 TPIE HOME FIRES BURNING 

America is waging- a Avar against Avar, and victory Avill be 
meaningless unless it brings universal disarmament. i\Iili- 
tarism and the A\4cked ideals back of it, must be dri\^en out 
of the Avorld. 



COMFORT THE WAR BURDENED. 

From an Address to Kansas National Guardsmen at Camp 
Doniphan, Okla., Octoher 19, 1917. 

I bring you greetings from your oAvn people, from the 
dear ones you have left behind and from the great com- 
munity' that looks upon you Avith affectionate pride as you 
go forth to battle against threatened AA'orld tyranny. 

But Ave, Avho are left behind, Avould make a mockery of 
our professions of pride and affection in you, did aa'c stop 
merely Avith the Avaving of banners and the shouting of 
applause. I am glad to be able to tell you that our senti- 
ments are expressing themselves in more substantial form, 
that A\^e are preparing to see that the loved ones you have 
left behind in order to make this supreme sacrifice shall not 
A\'ant during your absence. I am urging the people of the 
state not to forget, and not to neglect this duty Ave oaa'C to 
these loved ones of yours, the tenderest care and deepest 
solicitude. I tliink I can promise you that they Avill be 
shielded, and protected, and cared for. They are bearing a 
heavy burd-en, and it is our business, our first duty, to do 
everything avc possibly can to ligliten that burden — -to sus- 
tain and comfort the brave hearts Avho are so deeply feeling 
your absence. 

Personally and officially it .shall bo my endeaA^or to keep 
the home people ever mindful of this duty, so that you may 
give your undivided attention to the work at hnnd — ^the 
smashing of your country's foes. 

The eagerness of the people back home to back you up in 
CA'cry manner possible, is shoAvn by the A^olunteers engaged 
in knitting Avarm garments, in providing comfort bags, in 



LENDERS TO THE GOVERNMENT 53 

subscribing to the Red Cross and in providing the sinews of 
war thru the Liberty loan. Men and women, and even the 
children, God bless them, are lending their savings to the 
government that you men may have everything in the way 
of clothing and equipment, and arms and munitions neces- 
sary to fight this war to a triumphant finish. 

We want you to know we are keeping a place for you, a 
place in our hearts and in our lives, to which you will return 
with all the honors that come to brave men who have fought 
a good fight. 



GET THE GOU-GERS. 

From av Address at Jorhalo, Kan., October 26, 1917. 

If the war is prolonged it will tax the financial, the in- 
dustrial, the moral and agricultural resources of the nation. 
It is to be a war of endurance and to win it, we shall have 
to conserve every resource to the utmost. The supreme test 
of the nation has come and it reaches down to all of us. 

If we are to see this thing thru, our financial resources 
must be enlisted along with our boys and our young men. 
When we consider the patriotism of the mothers who are 
giving their boys, how shall we speak of the man who gives 
all his energy to making money, or of the man who seeks 
enormous gains thru controlling the necessities of life in 
war time? 

From East to West we have reached the end of plunder- 
ing. With Avar expenses of 50 million dollars a day to be 
met by only 100 millions of people, we must take the pay 
out of patriotism and the profit out of profiteering. We 
have come to the point in the war where all profiteering 
must cease, simply as a matter of self-preservation in the 
interest of the 100 millions of people who now must strain 
every resource that they may shoulder the colossal burdens 
of the world-struggle. The greatest traitor now is the 
profiteer. 



54 WARTIME PROFITS DIRTY DOLLARS 

If soldiers are to give their lives and the people give of 
their savings, then we must say to the rich business man, 
"You must give of your war profits.'' There can be no 
justification for a war that exacts of one man his service in 
the field and his hh)od upon tiie altar of patriotism, but 
which at the same time permits other men to stay at home 
and fill tlieir pockets with money made out of the desperate 
conditions that war creates. 

in a war that demands the lives and money of the Ameri- 
can people there can be no trifling with gougers of any 
desci'iption, be they big or little. I liope the government 
will show no mercy to the ravenous wolves, the footl specu- 
lators and gamblers, who are taking advantage of the stress 
of wartimes to coin the hardships of men, women and chil- 
dren into dirty dollars. These men are traitors to their 
country and the penitentiary is too good for them. 

Yet we are going to win this conflict. The struggle will 
be desperate, but we shall win because we are right. 

We are right because we are on the side of humanity and 
fighting for a righteous cause; because this nation never 
starts sometliing that it cannot finish; because America will 
put into the fight the final punch that can and will win it. 

The victory which will be ours will be a victory of civil- 
ization over bai-l):irisiii, of justice over injustice, of honor 
ovei" dishonor. 



TIIE FLOWER OF AMERICAN MANHOOD, 

From an Address (if Ed(jerto», Kan., October 27, 1917. 

All lionor to our men here at home wiio already are in the 
ranks. They are of the nation 's best — the flower of Ameri- 
can nuinhood. We are saying to these young men: "You 
nnist die if necessary to protect the property and liberty of 
those of us who do not go upon the field of battle." While 
5 per cent will go to the front, 95 per cent will stay at home. 
It is no time for slacking at home. The devotion of the men 



THE WEAPON OE EOOD 55 

who go to the frout becomes an added obligation on the 
home-staying person, for whose ease and comfort and very 
life and liberty the others offer to give up their lives. 
Therefore, the least that we can do at home is to support 
tlie government in its great task with every ounce of loyalty 
and endurance there is in us. 

The young men who go to France, the mothers who part 
with their sons, the wives who part with their husbands, are 
giving until it hurts. The war will not be war without 
many casualties, but the number hurt at the front will be 
far less if those who stay at home give until it hurts — give 
ungrudgingly of their money, their time and their strength. 

It is impossible for anyone to estimate how long this war 
is going to last. One guess perhaps is as good as another. 
A few weeks ago I talked with General Joffre and M. 
Mviani, two distinguished members of the French Commis- 
sion. I am daily in receipt of letters and telegrams from 
the President, from the war department and from the Na- 
tional Council of Defense. What I learn from these sources 
of information makes it more apparent to me each day that 
the war will last at least two years, possibly three. And so 
it is well for us earnestly to consider thg^t we are in a 
serious business and shape our lives and bend our energies 
accordingly. 

There have been withdrawn from the industries of Europe 
for this war in round numbers, 61 million men. Seven mil- 
lion men have been killed. Fifteen million have been 
wounded. Five million are in prisons. Thirty-five million 
are in military camps or trenches. This means that ours is 
the only large and important producing country whose 
productive processes have not seriously been interrupted. 
It means that we must fight this war not with guns alone 
but with food. We must not only be able to produce the 
food, but Ave must be able to transport it to the countries 
where it will be needed. That is the truly big task that now 
faces us. 

The Allies, according to the best estimates we have, will 



5(i WASTE IS WICKED 

need within the next year 500 million bnshels of breadstuffs, 
America is expected to supply at least 200 million bushels. 
But tlie best that we can do is to provide 45 million bushels 
of wheat during the next year, which simply means that we 
must eat more corn and less wheat than in the past. 

Certainly we should set ourselves at once to check all 
waste, and to put the ban on extravagance and luxury and 
self-indulgence. W^aste is wicked at any time. Waste at 
this time is a crime against civilization. Everything we can 
save in food or clothing, or in any other of the essentials of 
life, by just that much we shall lessen the demand u]>on tlie 
country's supply. 



OUR TWO DEADLIEST FOES. 

From an Address to the All-Kansas National Army Regi- 
ment, the 353rd Infantry, at Camp Funston, Novem- 
ber 5, 1917. 

1 am here to ])i'iiig you a message of appreciation and good 
wishes from tlu' people of Kansas. I don't think it is ])os- 
sible for you boys to realize the great pl-ice you now o('cui)y 
ill the minds and hearts of those at home — of all your coun- 
trymen. We shall all watch, and pray, and hope you may 
tread the fiery furnace unscathed if possible, for we know 
you will do your duty whatever the cost. 

AVheu everything humanity and civilization hold dear is 
the issue in the greatest war of all time, there is only one 
thing that can give a real man any satisfaction. And that 
is 1() ii'ain himself systematically and thoroly, as you are 
ditiiig here, until he is magnificently fit, and then to go 
straight to it, as you will do. If I could change places with 
one of you and put on the uniform you wear, I would do it. 
(iod bless you boys, Iceep fit, keep clean, be manly morally, 
and you will be doubly armed. Then your happiness and 
well-lieing are assured, whatever may befall you, and you 
will constitute the finest ind the most invincible army the 
world has ever seen. 



THE^BEST SOLDIER 57 

It is a great comfort to me and to all of us to know that 
while science has increased the diabolism of war, it has more 
than atoned for this by wiping- out many of the greater 
horrors of camp and barrack life. There are only two of 
war's wretched CLimp followers left — immorality and drunk- 
enness — and they have slain millions to war's thousands. 
The word has gone forth that the camps of America's sol- 
diers are to be clean and decent — a model for the world. 
So f-ir as it is humanly possible it is the purpose of your 
Commaiuler-in Chief, your officers and the American peo- 
ple to protect you from these curses. But your own sterling 
manhood will be your best shield and buckler against those 
treacherous and deadly foes. 

I am told that in the war zone, it's the clean, decent fel- 
low, the man who behaves himself at home and wherever he 
is, and not the mucker and the rowdy, who makes the real 
fighting man. The men of this camp, I understand, grade 
first in these highest qualities of manhood and all Kansas 
is proud, mighty proud, that it does. 

1 want you to know that while you are offering all any 
man may offer in support of any cause, that I promise, and 
Kansas promises, to shield and protect, to watch over and 
to care for those left at home, who, in consequence of your 
leaving, may be bearing heavier burdens. We shall do 
everything possible to sustain and help them, that you may 
with quiet mind and firm purpose give your whole atten- 
tion to the great task, the glorious task of smashing the most 
dial)olical thinu' ever let loose from hell — Prussianism. 



WE MUST STAND BY THE KANSAS BOYS 
AT THE FRONT. 

From (1)1 Address to the Woodmen Convention at Welling- 
ton, November 17, 1917. 

We are told over and over again that we in America, and 
especially we folks of the Middle-West have not begun as 
yet to appreciate we are at war. It is said we know nothing 



58 THOSE WHO SACRIFICE ALL 

about its horrors, its agonies, its tragedy. Perhaps not. It 
is not eas}' for us to put ourselves in the other man's place. 
We cannot realize what the loss of a son or a husband, a 
brother or a loved one, means until the loss conies home to 
us ourselves. And yet, my friends, even here in Kansas, far 
from the scene of actual wai^fare, I have seen in the last few 
months more suffering, more agony than I should have 
thought possible in a world ruled by a Divine Providence. 
Every day and every hour since the call was made I have 
listened to stories that meant heartaches and grief. Every 
mail has brought stacks of letters with appeals from motliers 
and' wives with sad hearts. You cannot tell gray-liaired 
mothers who have sent their boys to the camps that they do 
jiot know what war means ! You cannot say to a young wife 
torn from the arms of her husband that she does not yet 
realize that we are at war! They know, whether you and T 
know or not ! They need no speeches to arouse them. 

For weeks my office at the state house and even my home 
have been besieged by members of the families of th<' boys 
called to the service. They come in no spirit of disloyalty ; 
not to complain ; not to protest ; but seeking advice and 
counsel. They want to know "What are we to do?" 

A young farmer — to cite a typical case — came to my house 
early one morning recently. His wife ami young child came 
with him. He owns a farm in the western part of the state 
only i)artly paid for. His land had yielded just a small crop 
this year, but lie had the true Kansas spirit, he had grit. He 
promised himself he'd ])ull thru somehow. And then his 
number w-as drawn and he was .selected for service. "What 
am I to do?" he asked. His frail little wife cannot manage 
the farm alone. It was nip-and-tuck as it was — as nuich as 
both of them together could do to keep ahead of the interest 
and taxes and provide a living for the little home flock. 
Everything he had in the world was at stake, and yet he 
said, over and over, after I had read him the law as it had 
been given lo me by the head of the goverinnent, "I'm no 
slacker, Governor. I want to do my duty. I'm willing to 



DEMOCRACY (W AMERl(^\'8 ARMY :>!) 

die for my country if need be, I'm ready to go, but must 
ray family suffer, too? Must I sacrifice everything 1 have 
worked so hard to gain? There ought to be some other 
way!" "We need him. Oh, so badly," said the little wife 
with tears in her eyes. "I want my papa at home," said 
the little one. 

Wliat could 1 say to tliat young man ? Seated in a com- 
fortable chair in a comfortable home, what could I say to 
him? What cm I say in hundreds of similar cases? What 
can any of us who remain at home say to the millions who 
are going to the front to fight our battles for us? 

Recently I visited Camp Doniphan, in Oklahoma, where 
there are 10,000 fine, up-standing, clean young Kansas vol- 
unteers. The commanding general, knowing my keen in- 
terest in the boys, lined up the entire Kansas army before 
me for review. I think it moved and stirred me as nothing 
else in my life has done. There were soldiers in that camp 
from other states but the 10,000 Kansas boys as they stood 
there seemed to me a little the finest, the cleanest, the 
bravest I had ever seen — the flower of the young manhood 
of Kansas. As I talked to them I could not keep from my 
mind the overwhelming thought of what we at home owe to 
these boys who took up so willingly the duty ]iresented to 
them. 

A few days later I was at Camp Funston as the guest of 
the all-Kansas regiment, the 353rd of the National Army. 
Three thousand Kansas boys, the pick of the state, boys 
from rich homes and from poor homes, boys from colleges, 
from slioi)s and from farms on absoUitely the same level. 
As I shook hands with company after company of them and 
realized that my hand which grasped theirs had signed the 
order that sent them into active service, I resolved that no 
call for service to them would be too great for me to meet. 
I would go with them if I could but I can't enlist; I was 
born too soon for that. But I can help. I can and I will 
back those boys to the limit. I promised the God of Nations 
then and there, that everythi))g within my power shall be 



60 STOP P^AULT-FINDING 

done to aid aud care for those boys; that I would give to 
war work every cent of my income other than enough for a 
bare living, as long as the war lasts. And that is little 
enough compared Avith the sacrifices made by the men who 
are leaving their business, their liomes, their families, and 
God help them, perhaps on top of all that, losing life itself. 



NO TIME FOR HALF WAY SERVICE. 

From an Address at Southern Kansas Teachers' Conven- 
tioii, Independence, Kan., Fehruary 22, 1918. 

iJrought face to face every day with the heartaches of 
war. I loathe and abhor war more than ever before. But 
war — our war— is here and we must face it. We must face 
it with a high resolution to do everything — everything we 
can to defend our country and to further the cause of Right 
and Freedom. We must face this issue, my friends, face it 
witliout flinching or shirking. It may take every ounce of 
energy ; every dollar of money ; everj^ particle of ability 
that this nation possesses to win the war for democracy; 
to make the world safe ; to make America safe. We can 
liave no slackers, ]io sulkers, no side-steppers, at home. Our 
work is even more important, more vital, more necessary 
than the work of the boys at the front. Because if we fail 
tliem. if we go back on them, if we do not support them to 
the bitter end, all their sacrifice will be in vain. 

If I can convince the inaii and the woman who has not yet 
seen or felt these tilings; whose hearts have not yet re- 
sponded to this deep, human appeal of the war ; who are not 
yet doing even a small part of what everyone of us can do 
right here at home along with our daily duties; if I can 
convince them that they owe these boys something — every- 
thing — in i)artial i-eturn for tlie uttei'inost any man can 
offer of devotion, I shall be doing nun-ely a small part of 
iii\' (lut\-. Tliat is wliv 1. wlio nion^ than anv one of vou. 



THE DUTY AT HOME 61 

am 111 such constant touch with so much of the sorrow and 
tht; suffering and the sacrifice which has come from the 
breajring of these home ties, have come here to make the 
facts better known to you. We are going to stand by these 
homes and these men, who are doing the fighting for me 
and for you. 

AVhat sacrifice can the government ask of me — ^of you — - 
that we can refuse to make? The man who doesn't help 
and help to the very limit of human endurance, is stabbing 
these brave boys in the back. Even a dog has a sense of 
gratitude. 

It is time to stop finding fault, to cease complaining; we 
nuist take home to our hearts the fact that our boys — many 
of them already on the firing line, and a million more on 
the way — need our money and our energies. As they are 
giving their all, and going thru a living hell while they do 
it — away from home and friends — so we who are here in 
comfort must resolve likewise to give our all. Half-way 
devotion; half-way sacrifice; half-way service won't do. 
This nation wants no half-way Americans. We never have 
been luilf-Avay folks in Kansas. The number of American 
lives that will l)e lost in this awful struggle depends upon 
tlie support that we home folks give our boys at the front. 
The duration of the war depends upon how hard our arm}' 
strikes r,nd we at home have to put the punch into every 
lilow it strikes. A speedy victory with the least loss of 
life, depends upon us. It — all — rests — with — us ! 



NO TIME FOR FAULT-FINDERS. 

From ((II Address to Officers' Training Camp, at Fort 
Sheridan, III., November 20, 1917. 

Of all the acts of my term as governor none has given me 
greater pleasure than the mission I am here to perform 
today. I come here as the messenger, the spokesman of a 
million and three quarter loyal, patriotic Kansans, to bring 



62 PULLING IN HARNESS 

to you their heartiest congratulations, to convey to you an 
expression of the sentiments of friendship and apprecia- 
tion wliicli the patriotic Kansas people hold not only for the 
Kansas boys in this camp but the kindly interest and affec- 
tion which I know they have for every man in this camp 
who is wearing the uniform of an American soldier. 

I want you to know that Kansas is with you and for you, 
believes in you, has faith in you, and will back you to the 
limit. 

We have always been a peace-loving people in Kansas; 
we were not as keen, perhaps, as some of these Eastern 
states: we were in favor of keeping out of it as long as 
there seemed any possibility of honorably avoiding it, but 
from the d ly and hour that the government at Washington 
called for lielj), Kansas responded instantly. Now we're 
here ready for the fight. Kansas has always been ready 
for the fight, when there is fighting to be done. 

In Kansas we say : Whatever our opinions may have 
been in the past — and there were honest differences of 
opinion as to whether America should enter the war — the 
time for argument and discussion of that question has 
passed. We are in the war, we are in it up to our necks, 
and wiien you get into war there is only one way to get out 
so far as we in Kansas have been able to discover, and that 
is to fight, to hit hard, to give them the very best there is 
in us, to figlit in a way that will count, and stay with them 
until Prussianism and Old Kaiser Bill are wiped off the 
earth now and forever. 

It is no time for slackers or kickers or fault finders; or 
for talking about what might have been or what ought to 
have beeji ; I want you to know that in Kansas we have no 
sympathy with the kind who are excusing and explaining 
the sinking of the Lusitania, who seem to be doing every- 
thing in their power to block the game, and to obstruct the 
government program. We are saying to those fellows, if 
you can't help, if you won't fight for your country when 
it is in danger, for God's sake go 'way back and sit down. 



PRICE REGULATION 63 

To liell with the man who won't defend his country and 
stand by the flag when it is in danger. No citizen is worth 
a continental to his country if he won't stand up for it, 
defend it and fight for it in time of trouble. 

There is but one side to tliis fight so far as we are con- 
cerned in Kansas ; no middle ground, no neutral ground : 
but one side, and that's the side of the United States of 
America. They are either for America or against America. 
In Kansas, they are on tlie platform of the United States of 
America witli l)oth feet. I have been from one end of the 
state to the other in the last six weeks. Everywhere I find 
them giving loyal, whole-hearted, united support to the 
government. I have given public notice that if there is a 
man in Kansas who cannot give his undivided, devoted 
allegiajice to the stars and stripes, the quicker he packs up 
his trunk c^nd moves back to the kaiser's country the better 
for liim and the l)etter for us. 



OUR WAR WITH GREED. 

From an Address -at Fraternal Aid Patriotic Meeting, 
Topela, Decemher U, 1917. 

East and West, North and South, we are all beginning to 
appreciate that this country has as big a war on hand with 
greed as it has with Germany. President Wilson has asked 
Congress for more power to deal with our rampant profit 
liogs. Hoover declares, as I repeatedly have declared, that 
})rice regulation must regulate — not one — but all, or na- 
tional efficienc.v will be undermined. 

As yet, however, there is nothing to indicate in the prices 
we pay for things, that any regulating has been done. A 
Kan.«;as hog on the hoof at 17 cents a pound, should cost not 
to exceed 25 cents a pound dressed. Hogs on foot at 17 
cents do iiot justify 35 cents a pound for ham, and 50 cents 
a pound for bacon. Regulation has not yet brought prices 
down for the people in whose behalf regulation was under- 



64 COMMON PEOPLE THE BURDEN BEARERS 

taken, and probably won't unless the people get right 
behind the President and their representatives in Congress 
to compel it. 

I believe we should hjok this menacing situation straight 
in the face. Nothing is plainer than that this war can most 
successfully be waged and most safely financed by the 
square-deal plan and the pay-as-you-go plan. We cannot 
dodge an evil. We must grapple with it or be mastered by 
it. If we don't win this war. it will be our dollar- worship- 
ing traitors, and not the Germans, who will defeat us. 

AVith from 15 to 20 billion dollars of war appropriations 
to be spent yearly in this country during the war, nothing 
is surer than that big business will prosi)er. But to take 
only 1200 million dollars from incomes, and only 1220 mil- 
lions fi-om excess profits — a little more than 2 billions as the 
share of big business in paying for the war — and to demand 
17 or 18 billions from the people as their share, is so rank 
an injustice and so reckless a war policy, that it almost 
makes profiteering safe and respectable by comparison. 

We must begin right. If we adjust the burdens of the 
war so fairly they will not crush nor heavily oppress any- 
one, it means we shall shorten the war and lessen the car- 
luige. You cannot make a pint measure hold a gallon. You 
cannot shift the rightful war taxes of a host of middlemen 
and the giants of big biisiness onto the backs of the con- 
sumer, the wage-earner and the i)roducer — you cainiot let 
the j)rofiteers and the fuel robber and the stomach robber 
hold the necessities of life and of emiiloyment out of their 
i-eicli--and have a strong, an enduring and a luiited nation 
fit for the greatest war of all time. 

But give the people a chance to live and work uiuler sup- 
l)ortable conditions, let them be convinced their government 
means to enforce a square deal in the division of war bur- 
dens and they Avill go thru every Ilindenburg line initil 
they reach Berlin. Anyone who says the people of Kansas, 
or of any other state in the Union, are not backing their 
government every step of the way in this war, is proved a 



PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE 65 

c'oloss ;1 liar by the facts. The common people have given 
Uncle Sam nine-tenths of his array and to date nine-tenths 
of the sinews of war. Far too much of the burden rests 
upon them. Now let the one-tenth, which owns most of the 
wealth and property of the United States and has supplied 
the men for one-tenth of the army, hand over its share. 
And if it won't, make it. Let's all be equally patriotic, each 
giving according to his meiins to the war and giving all lie 
can give. That policy will not take from any man more 
than he is able to give and should give, but it will take that 
much. It will make the nation. unconquerable. It will save 
tliousands of lives. It will win the war. 



DONT FORGET THE BOYS IN THE CAMPS. 

From ail Address at a Patriotic KaUij at Cold water, Kan., 
December 16, 1917. 

Did you ever try to put yourself in the place of the young 
fellow who is leaving home for the training camp and for 
tlie battlefield in "a foreign land? He goes bravely. Ap- 
parently he goes cheerfully. But he goes knowing he may 
never again see the dear faces and the familiar scenes of 
the dearest place in all the world to him — his home, liis old 
home neighborhood, the town and the people he has always 
known. 

Then comes the day when the shores of his native land 
fade from his view. For days he sees nothing 1)ut waltn- 
and sky. Home and the home folks seem a million miles 
aw \v. Later he finds himself in a strange buid, amid a 
strange people speaking a language he does not know. He 
is leading a new, a most trying, a vastly uncomfortable 
mo le of life. Nothing is f :imiliar or natural, not even the 
place in which he lies down at night. All the time he is 
being trained to meet a strange and savage foe. There are 
nights of watchfulness, hours of idle waiting in the day 
time, a Avretched existence in dark and cold and damp 



66 THE LETTER FROM HOME 

trenches, and finally the summons to go over the top. 
About all there is left in his consciousness of a world in 
which once dwelt the spirit of God, of kindness and hu- 
manity, is the memory of home and the home folks. 

It is said that homesickness even affects horses, that amid 
strangers and strange surroundings, these dumb brutes 
have been known to refuse food. Imagine the ache then 
that often must come to the heart of the stoutest-hearted 
young soldier, when in the strange world into which he is 
transported there come to him thoughts of home. There is 
no feeling known to human beings that finds them so 
utterly forlorn and wretched, so pathetically and hopelessly 
deserted, friendless and bereft, as homesickness. 

To be homesick is no reflection on a man's courage, or 
manhood. The best men ara likely to feel it most. I have 
seen with my own eyes repeatedly at a training camp in 
which were thousands of young men not more than 100 
miles from home, how eagerly mail time was awaited. How 
there was alw;iys a stampede for the hoped for letter and 
paper from home when tlie soldier mail carrier came in 
sight. How small scraps of information, bandied back and 
fo7^th between men from the same loclity, were given eager 
attention. A spirit of happiness seemed to light up the 
entire camp. 

If you were to ask me Avhat in my opinion would do most 
to m ke the American soldier a first-class fighting man and 
bring him home again safe, sound and clean of soul, my 
guess would be that it would be frequent letters from home 
and copies of the old home paper. Cheerful letters from 
mother, sister, wife, or sweetheirt, filled with little inconse- 
quential details of home rffairs and the doings and the 
goings and comings of those at home, in the neighborhood 
and in the old home town. Letters from home make a sol' 
dier's life bearable. They hearten him like a stronir tonic. 
He knows the love in that home is reaching out to him, far 
across the sea, to the land of hate and war, and that love is 



DON'T FORGET THE BOYS 67 

a shield and buckler to him in moments that try men's souls 
and test their manliood. 

Some of these men virtually have had no home, other 
than, the locality from which they entered the army or the 
navy. It is here that such admirable organizations as the 
"Thirt3'-0ne Club" of Council Grove, Kan., help most. 
This club was formed to write letters and send papers to 
the Morris county boys in the service and it is doing a most 
Christian and patriotic service. It keeps posted in a public 
place, the name and address of every man who has entered 
the service from Morris county, and those who know them 
may write to them, which both the board and the club urge 
them to do. I cannot praise this plan too highly. 1 wish 
that tliis community and every community and the neigh- 
borhood having more than a very, few men in the war, 
would julopt it. Nothing will accomplish so much for the 
well-being of your young soldiers who are fighting for their 
homes and the homefolks in a foreign land, or are getting 
ready to fight for them, as the knowledge that thoughts 
and the love and affeetion of the homefolks is following 
them (lay by day. 



THE TIME TO PRACTICE THRIFT HABITS. 

From a Public Appeal to the People of Kansas. 

In providing funds for carrying on the Great War, it is 
imperative that the government's indebtedness be as widely 
distributed as possible. For patriotic reasons it is desirable 
til at every citizen bear his full share of the war's burdens. 
For business and economic reasons it is imperative tint the 
cost of the war be sustained so far as possible by thrift and 
sacrifices rather than by drafts upon the nation's capital 
or mortgages upon its future. Prom every point of view, 
therefore, the government issue of 2 billion dollars in War 
Savings Stamps and War Thrift Stamps nnist appeal to 



68 TLME TO PRACTICE THRIFT 

llie iiiiaj^-inutioii, the business judgment and tlie patriotism 
of tlie American people. 

Kansas Avill be asked to purchase 35 million dollars' 
worth of these Stamps and I appeal to all citizens in every 
walk of life to make the purchase of these Stamps a part of 
their patriotic duty thruout the coming year. Let the 
Stamps take the place of the ordinary Christmas gifts. Let 
every member of everj^ family begin a collection of the 25- 
cent Thrift Stamps to be exchanged later for tlie interest- 
leaving Savings Stamps. Kansas must show not only its 
loyalty to the nation, but must also demonstrate again its 
alulity to sacrifice. The state has been built largely by the 
thrift of its sensible, economical people. We must shoAV 
that we have not lost that homely virtue and that we are 
still ready to deny ourselves and to place the fruits of our 
denial at the disposal of our country. While the spirit of 
])atriotism urges a liberal purchase of these baby bonds. 
scif-interest also prompts investment in them. They yield 
a good rate of interest and afford an unequalled oppor- 
tunity for the s:iving of small sums, which might otherwise 
be wasted. 

Xo one can foretell iiow long the struggle in which we 
at'i' ('Ugaged will continue, but we know that it will call for 
the suiereme and united effort of the entire nation. No sum 
of money is too small to help. Uncle Sam needs all the 
loose change in the nation's pocket every day in the year, 
and I most heartily urge Kansas ])eople to respond to the 
nation "s cjdl. 

1I(»\V A LITTLE (JIKL HELPED TO WL\ THE WAR. 

Ffni)} (tit .[(l(]f(ss (if Triiiifij Methodist CJiurcli. Wichiia, 
./(Diuarij 6, 1918. 

Till- thought we must eonstanll\' kee]) in mind is that we 
nnist do everything we possibly can, in every possible way 
we cm, to hel]) accomplish the big task before us. "Every- 
thing" ill this case means the little things as well as the big 



'ONE OF THESE LITTLE ONES" ^ 69 

things. Wo must seek to help — as well as give our help 
when it is sought. We can all be a war committee of one to 
save shovelsful of coal, to conserve scraps of food, to work 
small pieces of waste land and make them work, to buy baby 
bonds. It is by these little things, multiplied in millions of 
instances and in millions of homes, that we shall win, and 
so end the war. 

We can never tell how far-reaching the smallest action 
may be. The day before I left Topeka for Camp Doniphan, 
a little girl — she told me her name was Dorothy — came into 
my office at the State House. I learned that her father 
was a Santa Fe switchman, living on Chandler street. 

Ciiandler street is over on the East Side of Topeka. We 
doji't show it to visitors. There are no big, fine looking 
houses over there. 

She Avas a shy little thing, only 8 or 9 years old. I could 
see some mighty purpose was working in her mind. It had 
given her the courage she thought she needed to come into 
the exalted and awful presence of a governor — and all alone 
— and she such a little girl. I longed to pick her up in my 
arms and put her at ease, but feared if I reached for lier 
she would run. 

She edged closer and closer until finally she stood right 
by my desk, and little by little, in halting sentences, I found 
out wliat she wanted. Dorothy had heard her parents say I 
was going to Camp Doniphan aud she knew that Christmas 
was coming. She knew Christmas was coming because she 
had a quarter of a dollar she was saving to buy a Christmas 
doll. But she had been thinking of the soldier boys she had 
seen march away. She wasn't sure Santa Claus would be 
able to find them. So she had brought me her precious 
quarter. And she begged me to take it to the soldiers to 
buy them some Christmas candy. 

How I wished that room had been full of traitor prof- 
iteers. Not that I like to have such men around. But that 
tliey might see the switchman's little girl give me, out of 
the big generosity of her child heart, what was probably the 



70 THE SPIRIT OF HELPING 

largest piece of money she had ever owned — a fortune al- 
most — that I might take it to give to one of Uncle Sam's 
big soldier boys who ought to have a Christmas present ! 

It was her sacrifice for the war. And it was not extorted 
from her. She offered it. She had come all alone thru the 
imposing corridors of the big State House to give it to me. 
It w^as only 25 cents. Most folks would think that a trifle, 
hardly worth noticing, but it was all she had. I took Dor- 
othy's quarter and put it in my vest pocket. Here it is. 

But I didn't give that particular piece of money to the 
soldiers. Instead, I took up my pen and wrote a good-sized 
check to take the place of Dorothy's quarter, and delivered 
it to the Colonel of one of the Kansas regiments with in- 
structions to spend it in a way that would make the soldier 
boys happy. 

Dorothy got her doll on Christmas, but I have kept her 
little coin as a memento — a lasting reminder of the loving 
service of a tender little maid. My check multiplied the 
quarter many times, but its growth didn't stop there. I 
have told the story of Dorothy's quarter frequently in the 
last few weeks, and scores of men and women have said, 
"If Doroth}^ could give up her Christmas money, we, too, 
can make a little greater sacrifice than we had counted on. 
We, too, Avill give until the giving is a real sacrifice." 

Dorothy's si^crifice has been an example to me and to 
hundreds of others; and I hope that you, too, will catch her 
spirit and overlook no opportunity, be it great or small, to 
help in the fight for freedom. 



THE TESTING FIRE AND OUR HOUR OF TRIAL. 

From an Address to the Topeka Trades and Labor Council, 
April 16, 1918. 

Capital, labor, states and governments are all being tested 
as l)y fire — in the darkest hour before what I believe is to 
be the most splendid dawn the world ever has seen. We 



THE WORLD GROWING BETTER 71 

have only to stand true, but that is going to demand every 
ounce of principle and every ounce of energy and of loy- 
alty we have in us. The Test has come — is here. 

As a nation we have created enormous wealth and we talk 
of prosperity. We talk sometimes as if increasing wealth 
means decreasing poverty. No one knows better than you 
that it does not mean that in this country and it never has 
me.:nt that in any country. The richest cities have and 
always have had, the most dire and degrading poverty. It 
ought not to be so. I do not believe it always will be so. 

There must be no backward step taken at this time. 
Laboring men and labor organizations are willing and must 
be willing to make sacrifices that we may win the war ; but 
it is not necessary for Labor to sacrifice Principle any more 
than it is necessary for the Church to give up the eternal 
principles upon which it is founded. Labor is willing to do 
its part ; but it will not agree that the war be made an 
exciise for the overturning and sweeping aside of what it 
has won by years of pitient striving. It will not agree to 
the importation of coolie labor or cheap Porto Rican labor 
to displace American labor; it will not agree to the break- 
ing of child-labor laws, of the 8-hour day laws, nor to the 
ignoring, in the alleged interest of speed and incre ised pro- 
duction, of any of the fundamental things that it has won 
for humanity. 

I am not here to speak in a spirit of pessimism nor of 
fault-finding. I would not for one moment have you think 
that things are hopelessly wrong, despite the awful holo- 
caust in which we are involved. Indeed, I am happy in the 
belief that the world really groAvs better from age to age. 
Otherwise, I should not have the faith and courage to face 
my little part in the battle against autocracy. I have the 
courage to help save the world because the world is worth 
saving. Outside of junker-ridden Germany, the world is 
nearer the long-sought Brotherhood of Man than ever be- 
fore. The hour of trial that has come to us — the testing 
fire thru which we are passing — has revealed our true selves 



72 KEEPING THE IJOYS FIT 

to ourselves; ami \viiile there are those so craven as to be 
willing to fatten upon their country's Jiecessity, men dom- 
inated by greed instead of conscience, the great heart of 
America has beaten witli patriotic fervor, and as a people 
w<' Inive said: "Here am I, what wilt thou have me do?" 



THE MORALE OF OUR ARMY. 

From on Address at the War Council, Memoriid Hall, 
Topcka, January 17, 1918. 

The production of larger crops and the thrifty conserva- 
tion of foodstuffs, necessary and vitally important as they 
are, are only the beginning of our duty. We've got to dig 
down into our pockets and give, and give, and keep on 
giving until we think we can't give another cent, and then 
start in and do it all over again. We must keep this up 
until the last vestige of autocratic militarism is swept from 
the f :ce of the earth, aiid our lu)ys come back liome to peace 
and prosperity. 

We've got to pay taxes cheerfully — such taxes as we 
never dreamed of paying, billions and billions of dollars. 

We've got to lend our money to Uncle Sam and hustle all 
the harder to get more to lend to him. 

We've got to contribute millions and millions to the war 
work the government must leave to us to do. 

The calls for voluntary contributions are only beginning ; 
they will press upon us with increasing frequency and 
stronger urging juid we must meet them without hesitation. 
There must not be a slacker in Kansas. 

The strength, the punch, the get-there-ness of our army 
dp])cnds ujion its morale. Its mental condition is almost as 
important as ils physical condition. Within the last few 
months I have talked with famous statesmen and generals 
of the old M'orld. They all tell me that discontented, lui- 
happy men do not win battles. Neither can dissipated, dis- 
eased men mike effective soldiers. 



WORK THE MEASURE OF SERVICE 73 

It IS the work of the army Y. M. C. A. to keep our men 
fit for the fight — fit mentally, fit morally, fit physically; 
and recreation; to keep our boys in touch with the home 
to ])revent homesickness; to provide wholesome amusements 
spirit; to keep up the educational and religious work nec- 
essary to the development of cliaraeter — in short, to make 
better men and better soldiers and better citizens of the 
bo}s we are sending to the Great Sacrifice. Aside from all 
reasons of humanity ; aside from our feeling that nothing is 
too good for the defenders of Right ; aside from our desire 
to render the sacrifices that our boys are making as light as 
possible, aside from all sentiment, is the big fact that this 
woi'k is absolutely necessary and we at home must provide 
the means by which it can be done. 

Wijen I Avas at Oamp Funston, General Wood told me 
that in his twenty-five years of experience in the army he 
uo\er had seen anything like the revolution that had been 
effected in morale and discipline by establishing the dry 
zone. He said that under ordinary circumstances the guard 
hduse in such a camp as Camp Funston would have an aver- 
age ])()pulation of 200. Then turning to the telephone he 
made in(|uiry as to the inimber of men under arrest and 
Icj.rned there was just one. Just one man in the guard 
house (mt of ;j5,000 soldiers and his offense was not drunk- 
enjiess, not brawling, but a small infraction of some little 
rule. 

"Nothing like such order," said General Wood to me, 
"has ever been known before in a military camp. I find," 
he went on to say, ''that the Kansas boys and men grade 
far higlier in morals, obedience and stamina than the men 
of other camps in times past. The percentage of vice dis- 
eases a.mong them is the smallest that has ever before been 
found in a camp and the discipline is the best I have ever 
seen. We attribute this," said the general, "to the drj'- 
zone order, and to Kansas prohibition which prevents the 
s.de of li(|uor. These Kansas boys were brought up in clean 
atni'»s]ihere — they started right." 



74 MORALE OF THE ARMY 

But what General Wood said to me when I came away I 
think is the very finest and the very highest tribute that 
has ever been paid to Kansas. 

"You can tell the Kansas people for me," said he, "that 
they have got the finest, the cleanest, the healthiest, and the 
most vigorous soldiers in point of endurance we have ever 
seen. The official records show this. ' ' 

Doesn't that repay you for everything you have done in 
the past to strengthen the enforcement of the prohibitory 
law ? 

It is to protect these Kansas boys on the other side of the 
ocean that I am appealing to j'ou. As General Wood has 
said, the boys have started right. If they remained here in 
Kansas and were facing life under normal conditions we 
would not feel our present concern for their moral welfare. 
But they are going to France and to other parts of Europe 
where custom and the moral code are entirely different. 
It is going to be a supreme test of their manhood. Are we 
going to help them to maintain the home influences? This 
is the crucial question. Its answer is your greatest call to 
duty. 

Our boys must be taken care of over there. Do all that 
we can ; give all that we can ; it is little enough to compen- 
sate them for the sacrifices they are making. But aside 
from all sentiment is the big fact that this work must be 
done in order to render our army efficient and the govern- 
ment looks to us men and women of Kansas to do our full 
share to support this part of the war's activities. This 
work concerns us deeply, whetlier we have a son's or daugh- 
ter's future in mind. Fathers and mothers, let this warn- 
ing sink into your consciousness. 

Wo are waging war today in the cause of Right and 
Freedom. We do not know how long it will continue, but 
in God's good time it will end and the millions of young 
men who are now bearing arms will come back to take up 
the duties of civil life. They will be the husbands of our 
girls. They will be the leaders of their generation. On 



PREPARING FOR PEACE 75 

them will rest the burden of reconstructing the world after 
this ileluge of blood has receded. God grant that they come 
back clean in body and mind with high ideals and noble 
aspirations, fit to take up the great burden that will fall to 
them. If they do not ; if they fail in this ; if they come back 
to lis dissipated wrecks, or blighted at the core by the seeds 
of dissipation, tlie A\orld will be worse off than if the Pmc. 
sian Huns had conquered the world. We must win this v, „. 
not for the mere sake of winning, but to make the world a 
safe place ; a decent i^lace ; a better place to live in and the 
world will not be that unless our boys come back sound and 
true men. 

This then is the Avork which your government calls upon 
you and me to aid : We are to extend some few of the com- 
forts of life to the boys Avho are fighting our battles for us. 
We must be the ones to give them a little wholesome cheer 
that will relieve homesickness and dispel discouragement. 
The providing of recreation and amusements for them when 
off duty ; the keeping up of home ties and the home spirit ; 
the safeguarding of morals; the development of character 
and manhood, so that every American soldier who comes 
home, shall come back able to look his mother, his wife or 
liis sweetheart in the face — or, if he should fall, who can 
face the Great Beyond with the courage and the calmness 
of a Christian gentleman. This is the work you are asked 
to do. and no true American can close his ears to the appeal. 



OUR VALIANT ALLIES. 

From an Address Delivered at the TopeJca Auditorium on 
the Occasion of the Visit to Topeka of Sir Frederick 
Smith, Attorney General of Great Britain, Who Was 
the Guest of Governor Capper, January 17, 1918. 

I am sure I voice the sentiments of all Kansans here 
assembled when I say to the distinguished attorney general 
of our powerful ally. Great Britain, who comes to tell us 
something of the great struggle in which we are engaged 



76 MORE THAN EUROPE 'S QUARREL 

and to give us renewed encouragement, we bid you welcome 
with all our hearts. While the people of America are 
sprung from many races, while all nationalities are repre- 
sented here, it still is true that America as a nation looks 
on England as the mother country, and in joining in this 
battle for world freedom from the Hun, America is proud 
of the fact that her chief and greatest ally is the country 
back to which most Americans trace their ancestry. As Sir 
Frederick goes about America he finds no doubt mauj^ 
things that are unfamiliar to his British eyes, but I am sure 
he lias learned that in patriotic fervor, in zealous endeavor 
to bring the v.hole strength of our great nation into the 
war, in willingness to sacrifice and in determination not to 
give up the fight, America is a fair partner for his own 
country and that American soldiers are fit comrades for 
that splendid army of brave sons of Britain who have stood 
immovable and indomitable between the Germans and the 
channel ports. 

If America was slow to awaken to the menace of the Hun, 
if she was deliberate about getting into the war, she is now 
determined to make up for lost time. It is true that at 
first the majority of Americans could not see that this was 
our war. That was attributable largely to the traditional 
American policy to avoid mixing in European politics. So 
long as the war wore the aspect of a quarrel between the 
European nations, Americans Avere loath to have any part 
in it. But when Germany thru her ruthless submarine 
policy made it plain that all who were not with her are 
against her, even the neutral nations; when the repeated 
l)utcheries of the Hun in Belgium and Poland and Serbia 
had aroused the flaming indignation of mankind ; when 
butcheries of helpless women and children on land and sea 
became the settled policy of the kaiser, then America saw 
that the war was more than a European quarrel, that it was 
an attack on civilization itself, and that our place was by 
the side of little Belgium and Great Britain and France 
and Italy who were fighting the battle of civilization and of 



A WORTHY ALLY 77 

rifrhteousness. America has had no doubts, either as to the 
rectitude of her decision and conduct, or as to the outcome. 
She is in with every ounce of her strength, in for a fight to 
a finish, and in for but a single purpose — to crush autoc- 
racy beyond power ever again to raise its mailed fist in 
defiance against the world. 

It is a privilege for Topeka and Kansas to have these dis- 
tinguished representatives of our great ally come among 
us, to see for themselves the strength of our purpose, the 
([uality of our courage, the firmness of our determination, 
and I hope and I believe as they go back to England to take 
up again the duties of their responsible positions, they will 
go with a conviction that we are an ally worthy of their 
confidence. As an earnest of the purpose of Kansas and 
Kansas people to stand unflinchingly with the nation bj'' 
the side of our allies, I extend to Sir Frederick my right 
hand and give him a good old-fashioned Kansas handshake. 
When Kansans shake hands it means the bargain is made 
and this handshake is symbolic of America's unshakable 
determination to be a worthy ally in this great war. 



THE PEOPLE'S TURN NEXT. 

From an Address at Farmers' Union Meeting at Smith 
Center, Kan., February 4, 1918. 

In taking over the railways the government guarantees 
them not only the customary and ample profits on their 
investment but to maintain and improve their property at 
public expense. No wonder railroad stocks bounded upward 
wlien these generous terms were announced. 

The coal operators have been allowed admittedly high 
l)rofits by the government to stimulate production. They 
may lawfully and patriotically charge more for coal than 
the profiteer prices of a year ago. 

The packers are guaranteed ample returns. 

The millers are smiling. 

The steel and copper trusts are happy. 



78 A CAPITAL CRIME 

War burdeus are now resting lightly everywhere except 
on the American home. The sorely pressed people are pay- 
ing not a legitimate high price but profiteer rates for ever}' 
necessity. They are feeling the pressure more and more. 
They have been voted unanimouslj^ the office of burden 
carrier to big business, little business and intermediate 
business, to shoulder their war taxes, with something more 
added, piled onto and transmitted to the burden-bearing 
consumer in terms of liigher prices. Every day it is becom- 
ing more pressingh' important that the government ear- 
nestly direct its full powers toward giving the American 
liome and the American consumer a square deal. 

It is not good business, nor good strategy to make the 
struggle for existence more momentous to the American 
]ieople than the war. 

Vigorous prosecution of eastern profiteers who grafted 
on army hat contracts, is promised. But that is not enough. 
The least the public demands and hopes for is vigorous, 
prompt and fitting punishment. No doubt many other 
grafters are watching to see what shall be done with these 
men. 

When t)ie officers of the print paper combine held up 
publishers in the United States for millions of dollars, and 
were found guilty, these exploiters were fined $2,500 
apiece ! And many a publisher in a country town paid 
them the price of this fine in excess profits. To be com- 
pelled to give up something less than a microscopical one- 
half of one-thousandth per cent of his ill-gotten wealth for 
a million or two of dollars, can only make the exploiter a 
hog for such punisliment. For such a license to steal he 
would willingly divide "fifty-fifty" with the government 
or eveji twenty-five-seventy-five. 

It should be a capital crime to exploit the people at any 
time, punishment to be commuted to a long term of impris- 
onment, but grafting in time of war should merit the drum- 
heail court martial and the fate the army metes out to 
traitors. 



THE CLEAN SOLDIER THE BEST FIGHTER. 

From an Address to 137th Begiment of Kansas Soldiers at 
Camp Doniphan, February 25, 1918. 

Meu, you are going out to battle for the best government 
on earth ; it's the government most worth fighting for. You 
are going out to fight to keep it for our own ; you are going 
out to fight for as righteous a cause as ever a soldier con- 
tended for and you and I and every man in America who 
has got the red blood of an American in him, owes to the 
government the best there is in him until a victory is won. 

But there is not a man in all America who thinks for a 
moment that Germany will win this war. It may take a 
year or two or possibly longer to do the job, but we are 
going to win because this nation does not start something it 
cannot finish ; we are going to win because we are in the 
right and fighting for a righteous cause; we are going to 
win because the American boys, 160,000 of them in France 
today, and a half million there by the middle of March, the 
boys from Illinois, from Iowa, from Missouri, from Indiana, 
from Wisconsin, and Kansas, will deliver the final punch 
that can and will win. You are going over there to give old 
Kaiser Bill a smashing walloping, the most complete, the 
most thoro and the best licking that ever was given to any 
royal potentate on earth. 

I would go with you myself if I could, I would be proud 
to wear that uniform. I cannot do that, but I can help, I 
can and will back to the limit the boys who are going to the 
front. Everything within my power will be done to aid 
and care for the men who are going out to do our fighting. 
I shall make it my business to see that the people who 
remain at home while you go to the front shall do their 
duty, shall bear a part of the burden. It's not fair to ask 
the men in uniform to make all the sacrifice. 

79 



80 REAL TEST OF THE SOLDIER 

(Jentlc'iiK'ii, I eon<>ratuhite you. The people at liome are 
l>i'oiul of you. They liave unbounded faith in you. They 
believe in you. They know you will do your duty. We 
\vant you to take eare of yourselves. Keep yourselves fit 
and ready for the fight. Army men, men who have risen 
to high rank, who have had years of experienee, tell me that 
the real test of a soldier is not his courage and bravery 
under fire, but his ability to keep himself in good fighting 
trim, to be ready always to hit the line hard. It's the man- 
li(io,l liehind the gun that wins the battle. It's the clean 
sohlier who makes the best and most efficient soldier. It's 
the man who is strong phA'sieally and clean morally who 
always makes the best fighting man. America is going to 
set an exami)le for all Europe by sending over there the 
cleanest fighters the world ever has known. 

Let me assure you that we have an affectionate interest 
in every one of you. When you get thru this big job and 
return to your homes, everything wall be yours. God bless 
you and good luck to every one of you. 



THE HOGS OF HOG ISLAND. 

Froiii an Address <it Metropolitan Temple, Kansas City, 
March ,-7. ]918. 

With a ^-apital stoi-k of >|^2,00() tlie American Interna- 
lional Ship-Luihling Gorpoi-ation is supplying the ''know- 
how'' in a 'iOO-millioii-doUar job requiring the building of 
the lu!^' government shi])yar(l at Hog Island, Pa., and a fcAv 
ships. All the money is being put up by the government, 
but tlic work is costing so far beyond the very liberal esti- 
iiiMtr allowed for the work that it is suspected the chief 
"know-how'' of this corporation consists in knowing how to 
skill the government. 

This ship-building concern is the child of the American 
International Go7']ioration directed by fifteen of the big- 
gest financiers in Ili(> Ignited States. It was created to take 



THE W(3RSHIP OF MONEY 81 

the Hog Island job, but its loose inauagement and reckless 
expenditure of government money already have become 
such a scandal that it is now being investigated by the De- 
partment of Justice with a view to criminal prosecutions 
while a separate investigation is being conducted by a com- 
mittee of the Senate. 

Indignation will be loud and reverberant at the striking 
workers in American shipyards, but in the case of the 
eminently respectable frock-coats who stung the nation in 
the Hog Island contract — apparently the old formula ob- 
tains of Addition, Division — -and Silence. 

The financier gentlemen who stand in the background of 
this Hog Island deal are some of our most resplendent and 
self-sacrificing millionaire and billionaire patriots. Several 
of them, as we have several times been told in the press 
reports, have given up their own business affairs entirely 
and torn themselves from home and comfort, to go to Wash- 
ington to work for Uncle Sam at $1 a year. It may ^be 
some of them, or many of them, are patriotically working 
for 100 cents a year and their country. It would greatly 
please tlie American people to think so and to do hero wor- 
ship at their doors instead of taking the sordid view that 
many of our financiers and directing heads of great in- 
dustries give us so much cause to take by proving to us 
again and again that' they care only for money, strive only 
for money, and worship only money. 

Big business, well-buttressed and provided for in this 
\\\\v by an indulgent government, by hook, or crook — with 
or witliout the leave of government regulation — is making 
more profits than ever before and Congress only asks it to 
])ay a ridiculously small per cent of the cost of the war 
wliile the people are saddled with the big load and continue 
to pay profiteer prices to these beneficiaries of the people 
and the government of the United States. 

At least let us be glad there is a limit and that it appears 
to have been reached bv the hogs of Hog Island. 



82 MONEY AS WELL AS MEN 

The people will note with strong approval and strength- 
ened confidence that of the two investigations promptly set 
going in the Hog Island deal, one was started by the Senate, 
supposed to be the bulwark of wealth, and the other by the 
President, and that both are getting results and are on the 
right track. 



PATRIOTISM AND PROFITS. 

From an Address at the Annual Fall Festival at Melvern, 
Kan., August 22, 1918. 

We believe out here in the West that war is the most 
serious thing in the world. We believe that war cannot be 
a half-hearted thing — that when a nation goes into it, it 
goes the whole way — not half way. We believe that we 
must put into it every power of the nation — not part of our 
power. And we believe that that means money-power as 
well as man-power. 

We see Uncle Sam turn to the man-power on the farms, 
in the shops, in the stores and in the mines of the nation, 
and say in the first year of the war, to 2 million of the pick 
of his sons, ' * I want you to leave your business, your home, 
your family — give up all your earning power and come to 
work in this holy cause. I will lose many of you. Many of 
you never will return, but this is your duty; you are a 
slacker if you flinch!" And more than a million and a 
half of the youth of the land have cheerfully and loyally 
answered that call, laying their lives and their fortunes 
upon their country's altar. 

The people of the nation, thru Uncle Sam, are not asking 
anything so revolutionary as treating billions the same way 
we treit boys. We don't ask Capital to give itself as the 
boys do; we only ask that it give us a part of its excess 
earnings. 

That's all we are asking of Capital in the income tax and 
the excess profits tax; and to most reasonable persons it 



EXPLOITERS AT HOME 83 

would seem fair enough. But the custodians of wealth 
can't see it that way; they are moving heaven and earth 
and Congress in an effort to escape any such arrangement. 
They say : 

"It's all right to sacrifice the boys. That's patriotism, 
and it's a great thing to encourage patriotism. But Capital 
must not be disturbed. Don't tax it; we'll show you a 
better way than that, Uncle Sam. Just write out your note 
of hand for a few billion dollars every month or so, at a 
good rate of interest, and we'll let you have all the money 
you want. And your people can take the next fifty years 
to pay off the debt. It will give your boys something to 
think about and something to work for when they get back 
from the war, if they ever do get back." 

I may mistake the American people, but I don't believe 
they will ever assent to that arrangement. We have no con- 
tempt for money out here in the West; but we don't place 
a higher value upon it than we place upon our boys. The 
most of us would rather sacrifice our fortunes than our 
boys ; at least, we want the boy to have an even break ; and 
in this terrible business we ask that the nation make at least 
as great a demand upon money as upon men. Use all the 
powers of the nation, Uncle Sam. 

The 4 million men who will be overseas by next summer 
are giving up all chance of making big profits out of the 
war. They will pile up no swollen fortunes. We ask that 
the stay-at-homes forego that opportunity, too. We ask 
that they be restrained from exploiting the public and from 
gouging Uncle Sam and that all the profits of big business 
above normal profits, and that of swollen incomes above a 
reasonable amount, be placed at the disposal of the govern- 
ment along side of the lives of our young men. And it is 
little enough we ask. It is only justice. 



NO TIME FOR QUIBBLING WHEN OUR BOYS 
ARE DYING. 

From a Speech Opening Bed Cross Drive in Harper 
County, May 12, 1918. 

We have been too easy with those who spread sedition 
and disloyalty. We are fighting now for the very existence 
of our homes and schools and democratic ideals, and there 
is no place in this state for any citizen who is not willing to 
put everything on his country's altar. Every man must 
throw all of himself back of the government. There is no 
half-wa}' business about this war game. 

It is no time now to quibble or complain when our boys 
are fighting and dying at the front. Our money, and the 
best tliat we have, is needed right now to save the lives of 
those boys. The government has drafted the young men. 
Isn't it time to draft the money that is piling up in the 
banks? What good will all our money do if we get licked 
by the Huns? I promised the President and I promised 
the National War Council that wc would back our govern- 
ment with all Kansas has — with the courage, the devotion, 
the spirit of sacrifice, and the unconquerable determination 
shown by its pioneers. I told tliem Kansas would back tlie 
government at Washington to the limit, that Kansas Avould 
be one of the first to go over the top for the Liberty bonds, 
that we would respond to every call the government made 
u])on us. That pledge is being kept faithfully and loyally. 

The government has taken our boj'S but it has not asked 
us as yet to give our all. We are asked only to do our part. 
And if we do our part promptly, cheerfully, all of us join- 
ing, we can end this bloody tragedy with fewer sacrifices 
of lives and without being forced to give up everything. 
Everj^ red-blooded American hates a traitor and scorns a 
slacker — most of all the pocketbook slacker. 

84 



A WARNING TO DISLOYALISTS. 

From an Address to State Guards at Canton, Kan., 
April 30, 1918. 

Complaint has been made to me that the Non-Partisan 
League, wiiieh has a large membership in this county, is a 
disloyal organization. No proof of this has been presented 
to me, but let me say that in a crisis like this there should 
be no question about anyone's loyalty. I want the citizens 
of McPherson county to send me evidence of pro-German 
propaganda or seditious utterances on the part of any 
individual or of any organization what so ever. If the 
organization is standing squarely and loyally by the gov- 
ernment its members need have no fear. Every organ- 
ization has abundant opportunity now to let the world 
t... iw where it stands. We cleaned out the I. W. W. in 
,L;visas last summer and we are ready for any other crowd 
that is not absolutely and thoroly loyal to the government. 
There can be no half-way loyalty at this time. You are 
either for the United States or for the kaiser. You have got 
to line up with Uncle Sam or leave Kansas. We now have 
nearly one hundred state guard units who will see that dis- 
loyalty does not get a foothold in Kansas. 

Disloyalty is not confined to the little fellow. I know a 
number of Kansas bankers who did not subscribe for Liberty 
bonds until they were forced to buy. I want evidence 
against the big slackers as well as the little slackers. If you 
know of any price-gouging or profiteering, give me the 
facts. The grafting profiteers who fill their pockets while 
the boys are in the trenches are traitors just as much as 
German spies. The people are willing to give up every 
dollar to win the war, but they want to know it is spent 
honestly. They will not tolerate grafting and gouging, 

85 



86 STAMP OUT PRO-GERMANISM 

any more thau they will disloyalty and treachery to the 
government. 

Kansas has no time in this crisis to waste in listening to 
disloyal agitators; and will show no mercy to slackers or 
traitors who interfere with the patriotic work of our 
citizens. 

You jire organized to uphold law and order, and your 
first duty as soldiers and as citizens is to discourage that 
spirit which leads to mob violence; that spirit which 
prompts men at times under the stress of excitement to take 
the law into their own hands. It is especially important 
that we keep this in mind. The public is in no mood to 
show patience with slackers or with traitors ; and in this the 
public is right. We have no place in Kansas for the disloyal 
citizen. But the regularly constituted authorities are amply 
able to cope with such cases, and we must not, ni a hot- 
headed moment, countenance lawlessness even to avenge a 
crime. It is your duty as sworn upholders of the constitu- 
tion and the laws of this state to be prompt in your per- 
sonal condemnation of the mob- spirit, and to respond in- 
stantly should the necessity of suppressing it arise. 

It is your duty to watch for evidences of disloyalty; to 
listen for unpatriotic utterances; to detect the traitor 
before he commits his crime. Use judgment and discretion. 
Report suspects to your captain, who will in turn report 
them to headquarters at Topeka, and together we will ferret 
out and stamp out the last vestige of pro-Germanism in the 
Sunflower State. 

MUST SEE THE WAR THRU. 

From a Memorial Day Speech at Fort Scott, Kan., 
May 30, 1918. 

The most noble of all our public holidays is, I think, this 
day, the day on which we meet to honor and to mourn the 
dead. Speaking here and now — and in this year of all 
years — I believe I voice the thought of every thinking 



NO HALF-WAY VICTORY 87 

Kaiisaii when I suggest we try to show today by word and 
by deed how much we honor and revere and love and re- 
spect the living remnant of the Old Guard of the 'GOs. 
Fifty-eight years ago they offered their all that this nation 
might live to save the world for freedom in this dark hour. 
They were the state builders of Kansas. They have made 
us what we are, the most virile, the most American, of all 
the American states and peoples. 

Some of the boys of the '60s are here today with the girls 
they left behind them 58 years ago. Now they are the 
grandfathers and grandmothers of the boys who have just 
left our Kansas girls behind them. No finer boys ever took 
up arms in any war than those Kansas boys, and Freedom 's 
banner blesses and floats lovingly o'er them in a foreign 
land. It is these boys who most truly do honor to the gray- 
haired boys and women of the '60s. 

We still have 15,000 of the "boys in blue" living in 
Kansas today, all of them bound to see another war thru. 
The kaiser has given them a new lease of life by rousing 
the fighting spirit in them. May they survive him and 
kaiserism many years is my fervent wish. 

We must get into this war with all our might, see it thru, 
stay with it until the war brings forth what Lincoln called 
a new birth of freedom. The more anxiously we desire 
peace the more aggressively and loyally we should back 
our fighting forces. We must keep up the fight until we 
win a complete victory ; not a half-way victory. Of course, 
we all want this war to end as soon as possible, but we must 
not think for a moment of a dishonorable compromise; we 
must not think for a moment of an inconclusive peace. We 
must settle this question once and for all. The man or 
woman who falters or doubts now is a traitor to the greatest 
cause of liberty the world ever has known. It is no time 
for half-hearted loyalty. We are either for Uncle Sam or 
for the kaiser. 

We have put the flag on the firing line and valiant men 
behind it. Don't doubt for a moment that our boys will 



8b THE BOYS "OVER THERE" 

carry the old flag thru to Berlin and victory. We at homo 
must back up the boys on the firing line until humanity 
and justice and democracy and freedom have triumphed. 



TAKE CARE OF THE BOYS ABROAD. 

From an Address at the Annual Christian Endeavor Con- 
vention, McPherson, June 12, 1918. 

Important as the work is in the training camps in this 
country, still greater is the need of its work among our sol- 
diers abroad where the life will be so much harder ; the dis- 
couragements so much greater; the temptations so much 
more difficult to resist. Evil women and rotten men will 
try in many w<iys to teni])t liini to do the things ho should 
not do. 

Our boys must bo taken care of over there. Do all that 
we can ; give all that we can ; it is little enough to compen- 
sate thorn for the sacrifices they are making. But aside 
from all sentiment is the big fact that this work must be 
(lone in oi-dor to render our army efficient and the govern- 
mt>nt looks to us men and women of Kansas to do our full 
shai'e to su])port tliis part of the war's activities. 

What Avo do ill the way of maintaining clean military 
camps not only servos our boys, but it is already creating 
a different atniosi)here in the armies of the Allies. These 
people wlio have thought that license and a certain amount 
of dissipation wore an unavoidable part of a soldier's life, 
are begiiniing to see that the American idea of clo:in bodies 
and clean minds makes better fighting men and greatly 
increases their effectiveness and endurance. It is not too 
much to hope that the example the American army will set 
in France and in Flanders, the ideals which we uphold, will 
have a lasting effect, not simply upon the armies of our 
Allies, but upon the character of all Europe. No one can 
foretell the momentous consequences for all eternity of the 
.^oO or the $100 that vou contribute to this great work. 



THE FUTURE CITIZENSHIP 89 

We are waging war today in the cause of Right and Free- 
dom. AVe do not know how long it will continue, but in 
God's good time it will end and the millions of young men 
who are now bearing arms will come back to take up the 
duties of civil life. They will be the husbands of our girls. 
Tliey will be the leaders of their generation. On them will 
rest Ihe burden of reconstructing the world after this 
deluge of blood has receded. God grant that they come 
br.ck clean in body and mind with high ideals and noble 
aspirations, fit to take up the great burden that will fall to 
them. If they do not ; if they fail in this ; if they come back 
to us dissipated Avrecks, or blighted at the core by the seeds 
of dissipation, the world wall be worse off than if the Prus- 
sian Huns had conquered the world. We must win this war 
not for the mere sake of winning, but to make the w^orld a 
safe place ; a decent place ; a better place to live in, and the 
world will not be that unless our boys come back sound and 
true men. 

This then is the work which 3^our government calls upon 
you and me to aid : We are to extend some few of the com- 
forts of life to the boys who are fighting our battles for us. 
We must be the ones to give them a little wholesome cheer 
that will relieve homesickness and dispel discouragement. 
The providing of recreation and amusement for them when 
off duty ; the keeping up of home ties and the home spirit ; 
the safeguarding of morals; the development of character 
and manhood, so that every American soldier w^ho comes 
home, shall come back able to look his mother, his wife or 
his sweetheart in the face — or, if he should fall, who can 
face the Great Beyond with the courage and the calmness 
of a Christian gentleman. This is the w^ork you are asked to 
do. and no true American can close his ears to the appeal. 



KEEP THE FLAG FLYING. 

Fro7n, an Address at Annual Convention of Anti-Saloon 
League, Topeka, June 18, 1918. 

Every additional bushel of wheat, of corn, of grain that 
we can produce; every additional hog, steer or sheep that 
we can raise, will help to win. But that isn't patriotism, 
and nothing else, it's good business sense — the taking ad- 
vantage of a good business opportunity. 

But the production of larger crops and the thrifty con- 
servation of foodstuffs, necessary and vitally important as 
they are, are only the beginning of our duty. We 've got to 
dig down into our pockets and give, and give, and keep on 
giving until we think we can't give another cent, and then 
start in and do it all over again. 

We can buy a Liberty bond. That is encouragement to 
thrift ;^s well as a manifestation of patriotism. 

We can all contribute something to the Y. M. C. A. and 
the Red Cross fund. 

We can also encourage the children to save their pennies 
for the Red Cross fund. 

Kansas women, I am glad to say, in almost every com- 
munity have organized themselves into congenial groups of 
workers to make supplies for Red Cross hospitals and the 
men in the camps. Their industry is untiring. 

We cnn write appreciative and encouraging letters to the 
soldiers. We crin see that the families they have left at 
home are not neglected. 

This, then, is the work your government is asking us to 
do, and no true American can close his ears to the appeal. 

We can and must stand unitedly on all questions affect- 
ing the war. 

We can, we must and we will, keep the spirit of patriot- 
ism and unity strongly alive. And we must not forget that 

90 



PATRIOTISM IN THE HOME 91 

the flag on our home and the flag on the motor car are con- 
tinual reminders of our country's need in this hour. 

There is a great and true saying that ' ' The homes of the 
nation are its strongest forts." This expresses our situa- 
tion exactly. I can make no truer statement than to tell 
you that an early ending of the war, and a just and true 
ending of it, depends even more upon the home folks than 
upon the army. Therefore, let each of us omit no act or 
duty that can in any possible way contribute to the de- 
voutly wished for result. 



HITTING OUR STRIDE. 

From an Address at Cherryvale, Kan., Jtdy 21, 1918. 

The American who has not felt a surge of pride sweep 
over him as he has watched the nation get into its war 
stride these last few weeks, has a patriotism below normal. 
As a people at war, we have struck our gait. The world is 
amazed and so are we. We are breaking precedents daily 
and doing the "impossible" frequently. 

It amounts to a wonderful demonstration of efficiency 
by a great democracy actuated by one common purpose. 
Its driving force is 100 million will-power strong. It means 
the certain defeat of that other kind of efficiency, the slave- 
driven efficiency of -the iron fist. 

Six months ago we were like a giant slowly awakening. 
Our training camps were not supplied, our men were not 
equipped, the submarine was sinking ships faster than all 
the world could build them. Washington was struggling 
with a tisk of such magnitude that Europe considered its 
achievement impossible. And apparently we were getting 
nowhere with it. 

Then the President and the people got together. Red 
tape methods were cut. Such executive and administrative 
geniuses as Stottinius, Schwab, Goethals, Baruch and Hur- 
ley were called in. Order came out of chaos. America's 
great war engine began to move. 



92 A NEW WORLD'S DAWN 

Six months ago we had only 187,928 troops in Europe. 
America's "'contemptibly small army," the Prussian war 
lords called it. It is now well over a million and increasing 
more than 100,000 a week. By January 1, we shall have 3 
million men under arms, the finest army and the figliing- 
est army the world ever saAv, 

In the meantime, while supplying and increasing that 
fast-growing army, America's "embattled farmers'" iiuve 
sent hundreds of shiploads of wheat and beef to our Allies, 
iuid 6 million pounds of food to starving Belgium.. And 
our great bridge of boats across the Atlantic is carrying 
bigger. loads every day. 

It foretells the doom of )iii]itarism, the dawn of a new 
and better world. 

The American people have had the vision of "the coming 
of the Lord."' They are "trampling out the vintage where 
the grapes of wrath are stored." They are marching on^ 
to end all war, to save a blood-soaked world! 

Was there ever a more glorious time to live, a more glor- 
ious heritage than simply to be an American citizen? 



100 PER CENT AMERICANISM. 
From an Address at Olathe, Kan., Fourth of July, L918. 

If the war lias done nothing else it has aroused in the 
hearts of the true men and women of this country a love of 
native land. America is awake; and from this time the test 
of citizenship — of mankood and womanhood — will be Ameri- 
canism. It must be 100 per cent pure. The citizen of this 
country who does not believe in American institutions, in 
American traditions, in American ideas and ideals, has no 
place among us. No matter where he Avas born, no matter 
what his training and education, he must from this day 
foi-tli stand four-square with American ideals. He must rid 
liimself of the pernicious doctrines of German origin and 
sliow by word and deed that he is in very truth, in hearty 



SACRIFICIAL AMERICANISM 93 

sympathy and in full accord with what the American nation 
stands for. 

The citizen wlio is not doing his full part in this war; 
who is not working with all his might for our cause ; who is 
not contributing to the utmost of his ability to the govern- 
ment and to war work ; who is not making the war his first 
thought day and night, is a slacker in action and disloyal 
at heart. We have no place for him in the state of Kansas, 
and the community which does not see to it that such citi- 
zens are promptly brought to time stultifies itself and par- 
takes of his guilt. This is a time when we are judged by 
the company we keep ; and I urge you as I urge the people 
of every community in Kansas to see that your town, your 
county, and your state is made 100 per cent American. 

Give us an Americanism that is not profiteering in pa- 
triotism. It is time for straight-out Americanism of the 
simon-pure, unadulterated, 100 per cent kind, with no ifs, 
ands, nor buts about it. 

We want in Kansas and we are going to have it, that sort 
of Americanism Avhich will put the good of country above 
personal advantage, gain or profit; an Americanism at 
liome that is willing and glad to make personal sacrifices in 
some degree commensurate with the sacrifices made by the 
strong young men of the nation who are leaving all, risking 
all and giving all with a happy smile upon their lips. 

We want an Americanism that places God and country 
above every other consideration in the world — an Ameri- 
canism in keeping with that of the noble women of the 
state who gave their sons and husbands to the war, dearer 
tlian life itself — hiding their tears while their hearts were 
breaking. 

We Avant an Americanism, not of the shoot-mouth variety 
— tlie kind that talks big and does little — ^but an American- 
ism til at will sacrifice and sacrifice again and still again. 
There is no room in Kansas, today, for the Hun- American. 
Tile loud-mouthed variety, the silly fools, who know more 
than the combined wisdom of the American people and 



94 100 PER CENT AMERICANISM 

their chosen representatives, have been pretty effectively 
silenced. 

The open traitor has been driven to cover, Tlie notor- 
ious slacker in most communities has become a marked man. 
But there are still at large a few skunks and reptiles, some 
of them loud in their professions of loyalty, who by sly 
hints and innuendo, are spreading poison skillfully calcu- 
lated to creat suspicion and unrest among our people. 

There are still at large men who brazenly hamper war 
work in order to gain some selfish end or to pull down a 
rival or competitor; men who discourage Red Cross work- 
ers; oppose conservation and spread abroad lies about con- 
scientious men who are giving time and effort to aid the 
government. These Huns at home are a thousand-fold 
more dangerous than the ignorant, foolish foreigner Avho 
has not yet been thoroly Americanized, and it is against 
them that Kansas must be upon its guard. 

We want an Americanism that is not profiteering in 
patriotism. 

A FIGHT TO A FINISH AND NO DELAYS. 

From a Campaign Speech at Halstead, Kan., 
August 8, 1918. 

I sliall make this campaign on a "Win-the-war" i)lat- 
form. If I go to Washington I shall go to help in ev(;i7 
possible way in a vigorous and determined prosecution of 
the war. I shall stand for a fight to the finish for a com- 
plete victory for world-freedom and for a permanent peace 
policy. We must not stop fighting until we have destroj^ed 
Prussianism and made another war impossible. 

I shall support every measure that will be of advantage 
in winning the war. It is inconceivable to me that any 
Kansan elected to serve the people in the councils of the 
nation shall let politics interfere in any way with his para- 
mount duty. I know I shall have no other purpose than to 
stand squarely with the President in every effort to push 



KANSAS IDEALS 95 

the war to a complete and speedy victory. And most cer* 
tainly 1 shall do nothing so monstrous as to block or em- 
barrass legislation of any kind for mere political effect or 
any supposed party expediency ; and in this, I shall be 
doing, in the main, little if any more than the Republicans 
in Congress have consistently done in standing by the 
President in the present emergency, when he and the coun- 
try most needed their support. 

I shall stand for equality of sacrifice. Wealth must carry 
its share of the burden, along with our drafted sons and 
brothers, and big incomes be required to pay their adequate 
proportion of war costs. 

Profiteering in war supplies and in the necessities of life 
must be ended. The plunderers and gougers who are taking 
advantage of the war to rob the people must be kept within 
bounds or put out of business. 

I shall stand, as I always have stood, for national prohi- 
bition, and for national equal suffrage. These are Kansas 
ide s that are good for the whole people. 

I shall do my best to take to the Senate of the United 
States the ideas, the aims, the motives that dominate the 
forward-looking, patriotic people of this state. If I can 
give adequate expression to the Kansas mind and to Kansas 
ideals, I know thit I shdl render a genuine service to you 
people of Kansas and to the nation. 



AMERICA CAN DELIVER THE KNOCK-OUT BLOW. 
From an Address at Ottawa Fair, September IS, 1918. 

The day of victory depends upon how hard we fight from 
this minute until the end ; upon how earnestly we Ameri- 
cans on this side of the Atlantic, buckle down to our war 
tasks ; upon how thoroly we back up the boys at the front. 

Our Allies, nfter four years of devastating war, ennnot 
be expected to increase their strength to the winning point. 
They frankly say that we must supply the extra force that 



96 THE ISSUE OF UNCONDITIONAL SUREENDER 

is needetl. And the foe, tho the tide has turned against 
him, is not yet beaten. "It's a long way to Berlin." 
Ameriea, from now on, must put the extra steam into the 
drive, tlie extra punch into the blow. 

This punch must have all America behind it. The gov- 
ernment will comb the country for slackers, and see that 
tliey are put into their proper place. But what about the 
worse-tlum-slacker, the men who prey upon their country's 
nei'd ; the men and corporations who hold up the public and 
make living difficult and life miserable for the great masses 
of people? What about enemy greed of this nature? If 
America is to deliver the knock-out blow, which we alone 
can deliver, we must be freed from these parasites. The 
next step toward smashing Potsdam is to lick the American 
profiteers. 

We iii'e going to win. We are not going to stop short of 
a complete victory. There will be no inconclusive, nego- 
tiated peace. Germany must be brought to the point where 
she will take the terms the Allies offer. But she will not be 
brought to that point until we call a halt to the organized 
greed that is diverting our effort and our resources to 
selfish purposes. We must stop the plundering of our war- 
burdened people. Their hands are full; their backs are 
heavy-laden; they have no time to fight the highwaymen. 

The sooner Ave bring the profiteers to time, the sooner 
will the victory be won and the fewer American lives will 
be lost. Neither the greedy profiteer nor the demagogic 
"})fitri()teer" ; neither the slacker nor the dreamer, can be 
allowed to interfere with America throwing its entire rC' 
sources of men, money and energy into bringing Germany 
to the point of "Unconditional Surrender." 



[N SELF-PRESERVATION PROFITEERING 
MUST END. 

From an Address at a Patriotic Meeting at Kansas City, 
Kan., September 1, 1918. 

Waving flags and cheering at patriotic meetings are all 
right as far as they go, but real patriotism means sacrifice 
and service in war time on the part of every one of us. 

This is a war of endurance and to win it, we shall have to 
conserve to the utmost every resource. This supreme test 
of the nation reaches down to every one of us. 

When we consider the patriotism of the mothers who are 
giving their boys, how shall we speak of the man who gives 
all his energy to making money, or of the man who seeks 
enormous gains thru controlling the necessities of life in 
war time ? 

From East to West we have reached the end of plunder- 
ing. With war expenses of nearly 2 billion dollars a month 
to be met by only 100 millions of people, we must take the 
pay out of patriotism and the profit out of profiteering. 
We have come to the point where all profiteering must 
cease, simply as a matter of self-preservation in the interest 
of the 100 millions of people who now must strain every 
resource that they may shoulder the colossal burdens of the 
world-struggle. The greatest traitor now is the profiteer. 

If soldiers are to give their lives and the people give of 
their savings, then we must say to the rich business man, 
you must give of your war profits. There can be no justifi- 
cation for a war that exacts of one man his service in the 
field and his blood upon the altar of patriotism, but which 
at the same time permits other men to stay at home and fill 
their pockets with money made out of the desperate needs 
that war creates. 

97 



98 BIG AND LITTLE GOUGERS 

In a M^ar that demands the lives and money of the Ameri- 
can people there can be no trifling with gougers, be they 
big or little. No mercy should be shown to the ravenous 
wolves, who are taking advantage of the stress of war times 
to coin the hardships of men, women and children into dirty 
dollars. The penitentiary is too good for them. 

Yet we are going to win this conflict. The struggle will 
be desperate, but we shall win because we are right. This 
nation never starts anything it cannot finish. 



MEN OF ALL FAITHS FIGHT; MUST BE NO 
BICKERING. 

From an Address at a Meeting of the Republican Central 
Committee, of Shawnee County, at Topeka, Kan., Sep- 
tember 21, 1918. 

It is to be regretted when the nation is in arms and men 
of all creeds, conditions and political faiths- are fighting 
side by side for the common cause, tha^ our opponents in 
this campaign are seeking to influence votes for the Demo- 
cratic ticket on a plea that Republicans elected to Congress 
will not support the President in his war program. This 
means, if it means anything, that Republicans are not as 
loyal as Democrats, and in his heart no one believes that, 
not even a Democrat. Besides, the record proves it untrue. 
I do not believe any thinking voter will be misled by such a 
statement. This is not a war of any political party. It is 
not a Republican war, nor a Democratic war. It is our 
country's Avar, and that is the way it is being fought. It 
calls for the supreme effort of every individual. In a time 
so fraught with anxiety, our energies must not be wasted in 
petty quarrels or in casting aspersions upon one another. 

There must be no partisanship in our conduct of the war. 
There must be no bickering or strife at home. Let us rather, 
even as strong partisans and -without in the least abandon- 
ing our political faith and principles, lay aside so far as our 



PARTYISM AND THE WAR 99 

war policy is concerned, all party differences, and work to- 
gether to make certain that every available means shall be 
employed in winning the war. Let both of the great poli- 
tical organizations pull together, with only one rivalry be- 
tween them — a contest to determine which can do the more 
to bring a speedy and decisive victory. 

It is a high, but not undeserved tribute, to pay the 
American people to say that there has been very little cap- 
tious, irritating criticism on the conduct of the war. When 
mistakes have been made, as they have been made; when 
blunders have been committed, as they have been com- 
mitted ; when incompetency, favoritism, partisanship and 
sectionalism have cropped out, as they have cropped out, 
the Republican party and the American people have shown 
a patience and a forbearance that are the greatest of all 
possible tributes to their loyalty and to their devotion to the 
great cause in which we are engaged. Every loyal citizen is 
hoping that every act of the President and those in charge 
of the war activities may serve in the highest degree to 
bring victory nearer. 

The Republican party is not a nagging, fault-finding 
party in Congress or on the stump when the flag goes forth 
to battle and Old Glory is in peril. 

The Republican or the Democrat, high or low, who in 
public or private life subordinates our cause to any other 
consideration, no matter what, or who fails in the full, de- 
voted and efficient performance of his duty to the nation, 
is a traitor to his country and a false friend of the political 
party to which he belongs. 

The Republican party, always loyal to the nation, has 
dedicated itself completely to a win-the-war-now policy. 

I have pledged my own conscience to support every meas- 
ure that will be of advantage to winning a complete victory. 
It is inconceivable to me that any Kansan elected to serve 
the people in the c mncils of the nation shall let politics in- 
terfere in any way with his paramount duty. I say country 
first! Win the war! Speed a peace with overwhelming 



100 MUST BE NO BICKERING 

victory ! I know I shall have no other purpose than to 
stand squarely with the President in every effort to push 
the war to a complete and speedy victory. And most cer- 
tainly I shall do nothing so monstrous as to block or em- 
barrass legislation of any kind for mere political effect or 
for any supposed party expediency; and in this I shall be 
doing nothing more than the Republicans in Congress have 
done consistently in standing by the President in the pres- 
ent emergency, when he and the country most needed their 
support. Indeed, it has been only by the aid of patriotic 
Republicans that the Administration has been able to put 
thru Congress many of the most vitally important war 
measures. 



BE AMERICANS FIRST— PARTY MEN 
AFTERWARD. 

From a Political Address at Richfield, Kan., Sept. 24, 1918. 

I have come here as the candidate of the Republican 
party for United States Senator, and I am proud to be its 
standard-bearer in Kansas. I don 't mean to say that all the 
virtue and all the wisdom and all the patriotism of the 
nation are monopolized by my party, but it has a record 
that any American can be proud of. 

Ours is a party form of government. This means that 
every citizen must to some extent be a party man. It does 
not mean he must be a blind partisan, least of all an offen- 
sive partisan, and not at all what we call a peanut politi- 
cian. Today in this great war there is just one America. 
It must be an America run by and for Americans, not by 
and for Democrats, or by and for Republicans. This year, 
while the best blood of America is running in France, we 
must be Americans first and party men afterward. I hold 
that any other kind of Republican or Democrat is not 
worthy of the name. 

If I go to Washington I shall go there to back the Presi- 
dent loyally and sincerely. Speaking for the people of 



PATRIOTIC RIVALRY 101 

Kansas I shall say to him: **We are with you heart and 
soul to win this war, and this means our lives, our dollars 
— everything Kansas holds dear. From no other common- 
wealth in this Union will you receive more loyal, more un- 
failing, more effective support than from Kansas." 

Patriotism is not confined to any one man or to any one 
party. No man and no party has a right to claim a mon- 
opoly of that virtue. I shall be the last to say that the can- 
didates of the Democratic party have not the same high 
patriotic motives and as loyal hearts as we claim for our- 
selves. In Kansas, Democrats and Republicans alike respect 
and love the flag, and together are ready to die for it. Iri 
such a time as this every American, regardless of party, 
should be placed where he can serve his country best. 
Political parties are necessary, and the best thought of both 
parties is needed in Washington in this great crisis. But 
party efforts should be confined to patriotic rivalry in a 
program to see which can render the best service to the 
nation. 



DISLOYALTY MUST BE STAMPED OUT. 

From an Address to State Guards at Pittsburg, Kan., 
October 6, 1918. 

Officers and Members of the State Guard: 

Of the many activities in which Kansas has engaged since 
the outbreak of the great World War, none has more deeply 
stirred me nor appealed more strongly to my admiration 
than the fine way in which the men of Kansas have 
promptly responded to the call for the organization of com- 
panies of State Guards. If anything was needed to prove 
the loyalty and patriotism of Kansas men and their deep 
respect for government, for law and order, the organizing 
in a few months ' time of nearly 200 companies with nearly 
20,000 members was ample proof that the Kansas heart is 
in the right place. 



102 THE VOLUNTEER AT HOME 

The state was confronted by an emergency. The national 
government had taken over our National Guard in its en- 
tirety, and we were left without even the nucleus of a home 
military organization. There was no chance for special 
legislation authorizing the formation of State Guards, but 
under the provision of a section of the state constitution the 
governor is given authority in time of war to call into 
action such citizens as he deems necessary to protect the 
life and property of the people of the state. It was by this 
authority that I issued Executive Order No. 1, the first 
proclamation of the kind ever issued in Kansas, calling for 
the creation of a State Guard. The best men in every com- 
munity have responded, and the result is an organization in 
which your governor, the adjutant general of the state, and 
the people as a whole, take unbounded pride. As your com- 
mander-in-chief, let me tell you I am proud of you, and T 
assure you that I stand ready to assist you and to give you 
every possible support. 

It is a big thing that you are doing. It is a big thing 
whether you ever see a day's active service in the field or 
not. The mere fact that you have voluntarily enrolled your- 
selves as soldiers of the state, ready to defend with your 
lives the institutions of the state, and to see that the laws of 
the state are obeyed, is a stimulus to the patriotism and the 
loj^alty of the whole people. The sight of you men meeting 
together of your own free will and accord, to engage in 
military drill, cannot fail to have a big effect in discourag- 
ing disloyalty, slackerism and traitorous pro-German pro- 
clivities. The enemies of Freedom, the disloyal followers of 
kaiscrism, learn from you that Kansas is in earnest in her 
determination to make this state 100 per cent loyal. The 
State Guard is nota "tin soldier" organization. It is not a 
picnic society. It is not made up for show. It means hard 
work for every member of it; It means a sacrifice of time. 
It means self-denial. But it is a duty which must appeal to 
every patriotic man who is able to carry a rifle. Next to 
wearing the uniform of the United States array and going 



IMPORTED TROUBLE MAKERS 103 

to the front to fight the hordes of the kaiser, this is the best 
service that any man in Kansas who is compelled to stay at 
home can render to his state and to the nation ; and I am 
proud to see that it has appealed so strongly to the best 
element in the state, and that the officers and men in it 
have shoA^Ti their determination to make of the State Guard 
a real military organization. 

I do not anticipate that you will be called upon in the 
immediate future for active military service. I do not be- 
lieve that there is hidden disloyalty in the state of suffi- 
cient strength ever to make any organized trouble. I am 
not looking forward to riots or disorder; but you, as the 
police force of the state, are a big factor in preventing the 
growth of sentiment which makes such disorder possible. 
You are the ounce of prevention which makes a cure un- 
needed. 

I ask you to make an effort to suppress promptly any 
effort on the part of representatives of the I. W. W. or 
other agitators to interfere with the wheat harvest, and sug- 
gest that you co-operate with the mayor and sheriff of your 
county in handling this emergency. It is important that 
the properly constituted authorities be vigilant and prompt, 
as our people are in no mood to submit tamely to interfer- 
ence from imported trouble-makers. 



REBUKE FAVORITISM WHEREVER FOUND. 

From an Address on War and Politics at Syracuse, Kan., 
September 25, 1918. 

As an American and as a Republican, I can, and do, 
respect and honor the ability and the high purpose of 
Woodrow Wilson, both as a man and as the Chief Executive 
of the nation. I rejoice that the American people and that 
Republicans — no matter how strong their partisanship, nor 
how bitter their antagonism to the fallacies of the Demo- 
cratic party's theories of government, no matter how strong 
our Republicanism — will not resort in their campaign to the 
little, carping meanness of peanut politics. We have no 
mud to sling at the President of the United States; the 
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy ; the man who 
holds the helm in a storm. 

As a people M^e stand by the President, and by every 
public servant, as he develops and uses the strength of this 
nation, and I have denounced, and will denounce, any criti- 
cism of the President or any of his associates, when such 
criticism is inspired merely by partisanship or malice. 

But wholesome, well-intended criticism is helpful. We 
should invite it. Such criticism is constructive, not destruc- 
tive. We are not yet ready to say that constructive criti- 
cism, made with honest intent, is either disloyal or partisan. 
Indeed, we hold, on tlie contrary, that unfairness or injus- 
tice or inefficiency or favoritism, if they exist in the admin- 
istration of public affairs, call for rebuke and criticism. It 
is the duty of the patriot to speak out clearly and freely and 
fearlessly; especially in such a time as this, when so much 
is at stake, and when selfishness should have so small a part 
in public affairs. The man in public life who refrains from 
criticism and rebuke of such errors or wrongs because of 
timidity in attacking evil-doing at such a time is, in m.y 

104 



PROFITEERING IS TREASON 105 

opinion, far from a faithful public official or a patriotic 
citizen. 

If I am sent to the United States Senate by the people of 
Kansas, I shall work for control of the government by the 
representatives of the whole people, and not by those of 
favored sections. 

Profiteering in war supplies and in the necessities of life 
is treason. Packers, cold-storage plants, millers, implement 
manufacturers, coal barons, have exacted bigger profits and 
made more money in war time than they ever dreamed pos- 
sible. I want to see the meat packers' combine throttled 
and the packing business placed under government control. 
We must put an end to these food pirates. The plunderers 
and gougers who are taking advantage of the war to rob the 
people must be kept within bounds, or put out of business. 
The time has come when these war hogs should not only be 
stripped of their unholy gains, but should be prosecuted 
criminally "When the price of wheat was fixed the price of 
wheat substitutes and all necessary food products should 
also have been fixed. When the prices of the things the 
farmers sell were fixed the price of farm machinery and 
many other things he is compelled to buy should also have 
been fixed. 



KANSAS RESPONDS TO ALL WAR CALLS. 

From a Public Address at Wichita, Kan., Introducing 
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt on the Occasion of His Visit 
in Connection with the Fourth Liberty Loan, October 2, 
1918. 

Kansas always has had a warm place in her heart for 
Theodore Roosevelt. As a soldier, as a governor, as Presi- 
dent, Colonel Roosevelt stood high in the admiration and 
affection of Kansas citizens. Even when Kansas has not 
been able to agree with all that our distinguished visitor 
advocated, it never has doubted his high patriotism and his 
unflinching devotion to American ideals. 



106 IN ACCORD WITH ROOSEVELT 

Kansas was slow in making up her mind that this was our 
war, but, thank God, Kansas did not hesitate, once the die 
was cast. In men and money, she has responded to every 
call. In every campaign, whether for the Red Cross, the 
Liberty loans, the Y. M. C. A., the Salvation Army, or 
whatever Avar cause, the response of Kansas has been 100 
per cent or better in everything asked of her. Kansas has 
done her duty in stamping out I. W. W.-ism and every type 
of disloyalty and I am sure that even Colonel Roosevelt 
himself is no more determined on a fight to a finish, an 
uncompromising peace of victory, than are the people of 
Kansas, On this issue Kansas finds herself in entire accord 
with Colonel Roosevelt. 

Let me urge my fellow Kansans to see that Kansas again 
goes over the top in the Fourth Liberty Loan drive. From 
the temper of the people, as I get it in daily contact with 
them, there is not a doubt in my mind that Kansas will sub- 
scribe her full quota and more to the Victory Loan, 



LET'S FINISH THE JOB. 

From a Victory Loan Address at the Topeka Auditorium, 
April 10, 1919. 

We are soon to start out on the fifth Liberty loan — the 
> Victory loan as we are happy to call it this time. It is to 
be our offering of thanksgiving, but the need for it is as 
great as for any of the great loans that have come and gone 
before it. And whatever any other state or people may do, 
Kansas is going over the top once more. 

I feel I am only speaking your thoughts when I say we 
shall do our part this time as a duty sacred to the memory 
of those 4,000 devoted Kansas boys who gave all there was 
to give and died wishing only to give more. Can we ever 
forget them ? What can we deny them ? This loan goes to 
help their dear ones. It goes to help the thousands of sick 



FINISH THE JOB 107 

and wounded. It is to bring about conditions that will give 
the stream of boys coming home their chance to begin life 
again where they left off when they pledged their lives for 
us. This time it is our turn — ours alone. Does anyone 
think for a minute that we shall fail these boys? 

The government requires 6 billion dollars more to do 
these things and to finish up the war . A year ago today it 
was the common belief the war would be going on at this 
moment. Had our expectations been fulfilled we would 
now be looking forward to and dreading the great allied 
spring offensive — the bloodiest of them all. We would be 
praying fervently, as many of us had never prayed before, 
that we might win the war. We would be preparing for 
still another and another loan, in the full knowledge that 
by midsummer still another 5 billions would have to be 
raised. We would be expecting this year to raise not less 
than 15 billion dollars instead of the 6 billion dollars the 
government now is calling for. 

The war has ended a full year sooner than most of us be- 
lieved it could end. The fighting is over. The boys are 
coming back. Already some of our Kansas boys are again 
among us. Soon the greater number of them will once more 
be walking the home streets or country lanes in company 
with loved ones. And we have but 6 billions to pay for this 
great boon instead of having to pay 15 billions for more 
tragedy and heartache. 

I am sure that most persons understand that while the 
fighting has ceased the expense cannot cease for weeks and 
months to come. Just as it required a mint of money to get 
our gallant, fighting army equipped and over there, it will 
require a vast amount to get it back. Until peace actually 
is signed, some of our men must remain in Europe. They 
must be maintained while there. Then they must be brought 
home. It is for these purposes that a part of this 6 billions 
is required. 

Then there are the obligations of peace. We must see 
demobilization thru; we must pay every dollar of war in- 



108 WE MUST PAY THE COST 

surance; we must maintain hospitals for our wounded; we 
must do all that possibly may be done to help our wounded 
men to help themselves. In short, having won the war, we 
must pay what remains of the cost of it, and we must pro- 
vide and maintain the machinery for a lasting peace. 

Our boys did not shirk, flinch or fail. They have won 
the war. It's up to us to bring them back, and to restore 
the country to peaceful conditions. Let's finish our job as 
faithfully and well as they did theirs. 



PROCLAMATIONS 

AND 

LETTERS 



109 



OFFICIAL DENIALS FOOL NOBODY. 

A Letter to Senator Chmriberlain on Health Conditions at 
Camp Doniphan and Camp Funston, Fel). 2, 1918. 

My dear Senator : — Permit me to thank you for the stand 
taken in your speech in the Senate on January 23. Condi- 
tions had become so serious as to alarm the entire nation 
and dishearten our Allies who were looking to us for speedy 
actioi;; but smug complacency and dilatory inefficiency 
seemed to prevail in the departments at Washington. 

I have been especially concerned by conditions in the can- 
tonments in Kansas and Oklahoma — Camp Funston and 
Camp Doniphan — where Kansas troops are quartered. I 
made frequent protests concerning such conditions, but 
without avail. Energetic and capable officers have been in 
charge, but they seemed so entangled in departmental red 
tape that they are powerless to promptly cope with condi- 
tions or to remedy the evils. 

At Doniphan 30,000 troops were dumped into a new 
camp, the most of them crowded into tents with insufficient 
protection from the zero weather and with a deplorable 
shortage of clothing. As a result pneumonia and other dis- 
eases rapidly developed and it was then discovered that 
little provision had been made for adequate hospital facili- 
ties. The sick men were crowded together in close quarters ; 
for weeks there were few nurses; the food was poorly 
cooked and served cold; bed clothing was filthy and un- 
changed for weeks; there were no provisions for bathing, 
and altogether the situation was disheartening. It is a won- 
der the mortality in Camp Doniphan has not been higher. 

I am glad to say that in the last week or ten days hospital 
and clothing conditions have improved, but I am thoroly 
convinced a radical change in the entire system is desirable. 

Ill 



112 DEPLORABLE CONDITIONS 

The lack of proper clothing and supplies, especially in the 
below-zero weather which we have had has been a scandal. 

The men at Camp Funston and Camp Doniphan have 
practically no field guns and only a few machine guns and 
modern rifles. They naturally are impatient and disturbed 
by this lack. They feel they are not having a fair chance. 
The shortage at Camp Funston and Camp Doniphan is pro- 
nounced, and official statements to the contrary don't fool 
anybody. 

Sweeping denials that blunders have been made will not 
avail. The President has the confidence of the people, but, 
like you, I believe the truth has been kept from him. The 
people, however, know of their own knowledge what have 
been and what are the conditions of the camps and their 
confidence and support and enthusiasm — an absolute neces- 
sity in winning the war — can be maintained only by the 
utmost candor and frankness and a willingness to admit 
mistakes and to rectify them. 

The people of the West have patriotically accepted the 
war, and realize that the winning of it is now their sole 
business. With them nothing else matters. And they have 
small patience with any system of red-taped bureaucracy 
that impedes our progress toward the victory which we 
must win. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



A PLEA FOR CLEAN CAMPS ABROAD. 
A Letter io the President, June 1, 1918. 

My dear Mr. President: — Permit me to bring to your 
attention the resolutions recently voted on and passed 
unanimously by the congregations of the churches at Beloit, 
Kan., and also by the Kansas Anti-Saloon League. 

Resolved, That England and France be asked to provide as 
clean camps for our boys as we have here at home. 

Resolved, That we protest against our grain being sent to Eng- 
land where a large part of it is being used in making liquor, and 



CLEAN CAMPS ABROAD 113 

where liquor is sold, and our boys tempted to commit excesses 
which wreck their lives and make them unfit for service. This, 
while American mothers and American homemakers are being 
asked to conserve food in every way. . . . Why not send the 
finished products to England as flour and meal, and not as grain, 
and in a great measure prevent these evils? 

Probably there is not a church congregation in America 
that would not take instant and similar action on this reso- 
lution, if it were brought before it, nor a public meeting 
anywhere in America at which resolutions of similar pur- 
port would not carry unanimously, or nearly so. 

The resolution voices a great wish and the anxiety in the 
heart of every American mother and every American 
woman, if not in the heart of every American father, for 
the welfare of these young men. 

It seems to me we cannot refuse to consider so strong 
and so universal an appeal from American homes and the 
country's devoted womanhood. 

Could not the 5-mile zone system for fencing out vice be 
extended to the camps of the expeditionary forces by con- 
sent of the Ally nations ? 

And, sooner or later, could not provision be made for 
shipping our cereals overseas as flour or finished products 
to forestall their misuse or waste by the brewer and the 
distiller ? 

I urge these suggestions as worthy of every painstaking 
effort which may be necessary to make them realities and 
put them into practice. I know of nothing else the govern- 
ment might do that would go so far to reconcile the women 
of America to the fortunes of war or that would cause them 
to face their sacrifices more cheerfully and with higher 
spirit, unless it might be war-time prohibition thruout the 
United States. 

I learn there is great bitterness and widespread resent- 
ment in Canada over the freedom given to the drink evil 
and the commercialized vice evil in England to prey on 
Canadian youth, and over the deplorable results from it. 



114 OUR YOUNG MEN SOUND 

I do not doubt nor under-rate the moral soundness of our 
young men in France and England. But I think we should 
make allowances for the difference in environment and the 
more trying conditions. There they are strangers and in a 
strange land, three or four thousand miles from home, 'gen- 
erally suffering from homesickness, and undoubtedly more 
easily drawn into the clutch of convivial vices. While it is 
true that the sale of spirituous liquors to our soldiers is 
totally prohibited in France and that the sale of beers and 
light wines in the military zone is confined to certain hours, 
I am assured these measures do not meet the requirements 
of the situation, and in England even they are lackmg. 
Faithfully yours, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



PUT DOWN PROFITEERING. 

From a Letter to the Food and Fuel Administrators at 
Washington, D. C, January 19, 1918. 

To Honorable Herbert Hoover, 

United States Food Administrator, 
Washington, D. C. 
To Honorable Harry A. Garfield, 

United States Fuel Administrator, 
Washington, D. C. 

Dear Sirs: — Believing you appreciate that a little de- 
pendable information from the grass roots outweighs a 
great deal of the other kind from any source, I am forward- 
ing to j'^ou this extract from a letter I have just received 
from the pastor of the First M. E. Church at Kanorado, 
Kan., a most excellent man and pastor: 

Mr. Hoover, Dr. Garfield, and the government have asked me to 
do many things to promote the conservation of food and fuel and 
to help the Red Cross and other funds. I have gladly and will- 
ingly done what they asked. The people have responded in a lib- 



PUT DOWN PROFITEERING 115 

eral way. We must accomplish what we have set out to accom- 
plish as a government. But there are some things which need to 
be righted, and by letting you know the conditions here, your 
appeal might do much. 

We are a loyal and a patriotic people, but there is much dis- 
satisfaction about such matters as these : We are asked to con- 
serve flour — which we have done — and are urged to use cornmeal, 
rye, etc. But these substitutes are much more expensive than 
flour, altho flour is somewhat cheaper than it was. 

Best wheat is selling for $1.90 to $1.95. Flour is $2.90 for 48 
pounds. 

Corn is selling for $1 to $1.05 a bushel. Cornmeal costs 65 and 
75 cents for 8^ pounds. 

This makes cornmeal much more expensive than flour. 

For the coal we bought at $8 and $8.50 a ton last winter, and 
even less than that during the summer, we now have to pay $10. 

These matters ought by all means to be remedied, for the people 
are complaining of this discrimination and will complain more 
and more if the wrong is not rectified. I am hoping your influ- 
ence with those in authority will avail. 

Such testimony in regard to the rankly unjust prices of 
many necessities, constitutes a large part of my daily mail. 
These letters are not complaints from disgruntled persons. 
In many instances they come from those who, like this 
pastor, see already the ill effect of profiteering on the 
American home. 

This is a people's war and should be conducted as one. 
There should be no profits in it for anybody above the 
actual live-and-let-live basis. The people expect and are 
willing to suffer necessary hardships and, if I may judge 
of their temper by those we have in Kansas, they will meet 
these hardships with smiling fortitude while supporting 
the national government with all their might. This gives 
us only the more urgent incentive for putting the blood- 
sucking profiteer where he belongs, an example and a 
warning to all of his kind, before they drain the people of 
their strength and resources. 

I am wishing more power to your arm, that you may soon 
bring to bear the full strength of the government against 
these traitors. ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



FARM FOLKS' VIEWS ON PROFITEERING. 

A Letter to the President, January 29, 1918. 

Dear Mr. President: — No more representative group of 
farmers in the country can be found than those who gather 
at Topeka for the annual meeting of the Kansas State 
Board of Agriculture. The men and women who attended 
the recent meeting here, represented the highest type of our 
rural citizenship. Not only were these farm folks the pro- 
gressive type — for only such attend these meetings — they 
were aggressive. The resolutions which were adopted, and 
which I have the honor to submit to you, are in line with 
the suggestions I am offering in this letter. 

The farm folks of Kansas condemn those who have been 
' ' profiteering and speculating in the necessities of life with 
a view to making immense profits because of the nation's 
needs. ' ' They patriotically accepted the price placed upon 
wheat, but they are incensed, and justly so, because no con- 
sumer has been benefited by fixing the price, Kansas 
farmers believe that every effort should be made to curb 
profiteering. Kansas has given freely of its young man- 
hood, has put forth heroic efforts in increased food produc- 
tion and, therefore, the men and women of this state feel 
justified in demanding that no undue advantage shall be 
taken of the situation. We must have prices fixed so that 
profiteering will cease. The good name of our nation de- 
mands such action. 

For years Kansans have been aware df the conditions 
which prevail in the management of packing houses and 
stockyards. Kansas farmers and breeders of livestock have 
paid tribute to the packer without redress, and now that 
investigations prove that our suspicions and accusations of 

116 



"THE INTERESTS" IN FOOD REGULATION 117 

illegitimate profits have been justified, we heartily endorse 
the action of the government in investigating the packers' 
methods and we hope this investigation will be so thoro and 
complete that not only Kansas farmers but the farmers of 
the nation will be assured of a square deal. 

Kansas farm folks feel that a mistake has been made in 
appointing as heads of departments for food regulation 
men who have large financial interests in the industries 
regulated. They believe that those connected with these 
price-fixing bureaus and boards should be men who have 
no special interests in the matter. Granting that the men 
appointed are men of sterling quality and ability, under 
present conditions there should be no grounds for suspicion 
in handling food control matters. Surely competent men, 
men with nationwide reputations for honesty and ability 
who are not connected with the industries regulated, could 
be found to head these most important departments. 
Kansas folks believe that the men who have financial inter- 
ests in the industries regulated should be removed and their 
places filled by men who have no financial interests in the 
industries regulated. 

Kansas farm folks believe that every possible aid to in- 
creased food production should be rendered and that dis- 
crimination against pasture lands in the securing of loans 
from the Federal Land Banks is unfair and unjust. Land 
to be used for increased production of livestock is just as 
necessary as is that in cultivation. We trust that the re- 
striction will be removed. 

The resolutions herewith express the unswerving loyalty 
of our people and carry a pledge for untiring effort in food 
production until the ^var is won. Our young manhood has 
responded with enthusiasm to the call to the colors, but we 
must not forget that the men and women and boys and 
girls who will toil in food production this year will also 
render valuable service to this nation and its allies, thereby 
rendering service equally great. ' ' The farmer who devotes 



118 FAEM FOLKS ON PROFITEEEING 

his time and best effort to increasing the production of the 
staples of life at this time is rendering his country an in- 
dispensable service." 

Very respectfully yours, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



PROFITEERS WRECKING LIVESTOCK INDUSTRY. 

A Letter to the Government Food Administrator, 
February 23, 1918. 

Honorable Herbert Hoover, Food Administrator, 
Washington, D. C. 

My dear Mr. Hoover : — The livestock industry is demor- 
alized and apparently is disintegrating. Within a year pro- 
duction cost, represented by the price of feed, has doubled, 
while farm livestock products are selling at from 25 to 66 
per cent higher than a year ago. 

All feed products are selling here at nearly twice the 
price asked a year ago, and this includes tankage, rather 
poor corn for feeding purposes, and cottonseed meal. Our 
dairy products are bringing approximately only 25 per cent 
more than a year ago. Beef is about 50 per cent higher. 
And hogs about 66 per cent. One-hundred-dollar tankage 
and $1.50 corn cannot be fed to $15.50 hogs, or better. Our 
dairy herds are being operated at such a loss that they are 
constantly being broken up and sent to the block. Such a 
condition is a calamity any year, but especially this year. 

Pardon me if I say that I think a mistake was made in 
not giving the Food Administration more power and in not 
taking care of the farmers and livestock raisers in the be- 
ginning as other industries were taken care of, so long as 
this was to be the government's policy toward the other 
great industries. Then, at least, we should have had some 
sort of economic parity between these industries and the 
farm industry, and not the ruin many good stockmen now 
are facing. It would have been well to have had producers 



WRECKING LIVESTOCK INDUSTRY 119 

and consumers represented on all price-fixing commissions. 
While every industry in the manufacturing field is assured 
of its cost of production and a profit, the livestock men are 
unable to earn enough to pay for feed. There should have 
been, it seems to me, a general and representative council of 
grain producers and stockmen, just as there was of millers, 
of coal operators, of railroad men, steel men and others, and 
with that policy followed in the case of the other industries, 
the mistake was made in not having one for this industry, 
the most important one Qf all. 

But having made that mistake, haven't the livestock men 
who now are victims of the conditions resulting from this 
omission, the right to expect the government to come to 
their rescue and throttle the outrageous profiteering in 
feedstuffs of which they and their country are being made 
the victims? 

From no industry is so much expected and will so much 
be demanded during the coming year as from the agricul- 
tural industry, and none of our industries is so badly de- 
moralized. Wliile I am confident you realize this, you can 
hardly know at first hand as we do what havoc is being 
created by this situation. 

Very respectfully, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



STAND BY THE STOCK RAISER. 

From, a Letter to the National Food Administrator, 
March 9, 1918. 

My dear Mr. Hoover: — Doubtless the insistent demand 
for price regulating made by farmers and stockmen has be- 
come an old story to you. 

Within the last few days it has been my privilege to talk 
with many representative farmers and stockmen of Kansas 
and its adjoining states. They are of one opinion, and that 
is at the present prices of corn and other feeds necessary in 



120 A MINIMUM PRICE 

pork production, the man who is feeding hogs faces actual 
loss. This also is true of the cattle feeder. 

Representative farmers, members of the National Farm- 
ers' Association, in convention at Kansas City February 22 
adopted this resolution : 

The National Farmer's Association, after due consideration, de- 
clares the $15.50 minimum, or controlling price on hogs at the 
Chicago market, is materially below the actual cost of production. 
This figure is already depressing production and is about to im- 
peril the future supply so necessary for the successful prosecution 
of the war. Owing to the radical chjinges in corn cost occurring 
since the early days of November, when hog prices were decided, 
we, in the name of Justice, both to the farm and the war supply, 
insist that hog prices be at once readjusted. 

Similar resolutions were adopted last week at Wichita by 
the Kansas State Livestock Association, an organization 
representative of the livestock interests of the state. 

These resolutions undoubtedly express the sentiments of 
men who have not only given the situation careful consider- 
ation but also are engaged in actual farming and feeding 
operations. It seems to me, Mr. Hoover, that such action 
must be taken, and that this action should not be delayed. 
The farmers' interests must be safeguarded if only in be- 
half of our most vital national interests. 

With a minimum price set on wheat, and a minimum 
price set on hogs, it may be necessary to set a minimum 
price on corn and cattle to safeguard the breeder and feeder 
of cattle and hogs. If this is done, the minimum in each 
case, in my estimation, should not only prevent the deplor- 
able losses from which farmers and stockmen undoubtedly 
are suffering, but should make it possible for them, and 
well worth their while — for pecuniary as well as patriotic 
reasons — to do their very utmost to increase their output in 
every possible way. 

I do not see how we dare do otherwise than make farming 
and stock raising unquestionably profitable this crucial 
year with everything depending on a food supply which 
under no possible circumstances can exceed our needs. 
ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



VICIOUS PROFITEERING. 

A Letter to the Federal Food Administrator, 
April 27, 1918. 

Dear Mr. Hoover: — I transmit to you herewith a letter 
from one of the local defense councils of this state. It is a 
fair sample of a swarm of similar letters I am receiving 
about the outrageous overcharging for flour substitutes. 

You will notice in this letter that responsibility for the 
price fixed for substitutes is passed back by the retailer to 
the mill company, which is under control of your depart- 
ment. You do not need to have the injustice of these prices 
pointed out to you. The people are looking to you for relief 
from such extortion. 

Never before in Kansas has cornmeal been sold for more 
than wheat flour, and the prices of the two cereals do not 
warrant the higher price for cornmeal now being charged 
the consumer. It is clearly a case of rank profiteering, 
made possible by the adoption of the flour substitutes. If 
further proof of this practice were needed it would be found 
in the advance of the price of potatoes in Kansas as soon as 
Potato Week was designated. 

The consuming public, the victim of this profiteering, is 
not fooled, and resents being gouged by the profiteers while 
it is making sacrifices to aid in the successful prosecution of 
the war. 

The people of Kansas expect the Food Administration to 
protect them from these injustices. They respectfully call 
on you to exercise such sharp control over the persons re- 
sponsible for this piracy that it shall stop. In every call for 
men and money Kansas has done more than its part, and in 
the face of these manifest extortions is responding nobly to 
the government's call for more money. Which is all the 

121 



122 VICIOUS PROFITEERING 

more reason why the government thru your department, 
and, if need be thru prosecutions initiated by the Depart- 
ment of Justice, should see that the people are given a 
square deal and not made the helpless victims of conscience- 
less profiteers. 

Very respectfully, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



A PROTEST AGAINST INEQUITABLE FREIGHT 
RATES. 

A Letter to the Director General of Railroads, June 9, 1918. 

My dear Mr, McAdoo: — The conclusion is being forced 
upon us that your recent order horizontally increasing 
freight rates 25 per cent will so disturb present rate rela- 
tions as to paralyze business in Kansas and completely wipe 
out our jobbing centers. 

As there now seems no other way to escape such a calam- 
ity, I strongly urge a delay in putting into effect the in- 
creased rates until some means may be taken to maintain 
the present rate relations between jobbing centers, and 
until our shippers and the utilities commission may be con- 
sulted in regard to them, and in regard to the burden the 
new rates will impose on business generally. Unless these 
inequalities between jobbing centers and markets can be 
adjusted, we are threatened with a paralysis of business, 
Missouri river jobbers will be enabled to ship staple eastern 
commodities to the territory that Kansas jobbing centers 
serve, at lower rates than these centers can. And Texas, 
Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico will be able to ship 
cattle to the Kansas City market at a rate not increased as 
much relatively as the rate charged the cattlemen of west- 
ern Kansas. These are grave discriminations, and there 
should be a most thoro investigation and a hearing of the 
case on its merits before such extraordinary action is taken. 



INEQUITABLE FREIGHT RATES 123 

During the war, our people will go far to abide by any 
action of the government regardless of the consequences to 
themselves. The present issue implies no question of their 
loyalty, but is vital to the preservation of the state's com- 
mercial intercourse with itself and with its neighbors. 
Whatever action the government may take ultimately, our 
people will stand by it, but we do not believe it is the wish 
of the government to annihilate nor to disturb unnecessarily 
the means by which the trade intercourse of any region is 
maintained, nor to put too heavy a burden on general busi- 
ness, which lias hazards of its own to meet at this time. 

We do not question that rail rates should be advanced to 
some extent. Heretofore, to make certain that they should 
be advanced equitably, the practice has been to give ship- 
pers and the public a hearing as parties of interest. The 
railroad officials who have advised the promulgation of the 
present abnormal and unreasonable increase of rates have 
for a lifetime given their entire consideration to profits and 
to dividends. They can hardly be considered an impartial 
tribunal. Such a stupendous increase as 25 per cent sug- 
gests its ulterior object may be to establish a precedent for 
a continuance of high rates after the war, should the roads 
then revert to private ownership. I cannot believe we 
should put so sweeping an advance in effect without first 
investigating all merits of the situation, and I strongly urge 
the shippers and the public be given a hearing before fur- 
ther action is taken. Respectfully, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



ONE LAW FOR EVERYBODY. 

A Letter to the Federal Food Administrator, June 8, 1918. 

My dear Mr. Hoover : — I am enclosing with this letter a 
statement I have just received from the Farmers' Union 
Co-operative Business Association of Sumner County, be- 
cause in its plain-spoken way it says what the West thinks 



124 ONE LAW FOR EVERYBODY 

about price-fixing on the one side, and extortionate prof- 
iteering on all other sides. Please do not mistake the tone 
of this statement. The government has no more steadfast 
and loyal supporters anywhere than the Kansas members of 
the Farmers ' Union, and the men who have signed it : 

We, the undersigned, compose a local body of the Farmers' 
Union Co-operative Business Association, who are responding to 
all conservation requests of our government. In return we de- 
mand and expect its protection. 

Standing out conspicuously before us, is the price-fixing policy, 
which has aroused so much dissatisfaction among our wheat pro- 
ducers. We feel that the hand of authority has dealt unjustly 
with the farmer in this area, in that it sets a price on our chief 
commodity without due consideration of the extortionate prices of 
everything that it takes to produce it. 

Now we want to be loyal to the ounce, we would divide our last 
bushel willingly, but we do object seriously to the enormous prof- 
iteering in the substitutes we are compelled to buy, this diminish- 
ing the purchasing power of our two-dollar wheat. 

We stand unanimously for regulation in these abnormal times, 
but regulation that regulates, one law for all. The same authority 
in which is invested the power to plac^ a maximum on our wheat, 
surely holds the power to regulate all other commodities in the 
same proportion. 

What we need is something to stimulate and protect our wheat 
producers. We fear that if decisive action is not immediately 
taken on this economic problem now confronting the laboring 
class, to which the majority belong, the effect will be disastrous 
to the prosecution of war activities and cause our people national 
regret. 

Everywhere production is the crying need, and equitable prices 
the demand of the hour, and to be unmindful of these is to be 
false to our citizens and to our soldiers. 

(Signed) 

FARMERS' UNION CO-OPERATIVE BUSINESS ASS'N. 

These rugged, hard-working men are not to be blamed 
for resenting their situation as helpless victims of a greed 
which finds its most terrible indictment in New York. I am 
informed that 21 per cent of the children in New York 
schools are now under-nourished compared with 5 per cent 
before the war. 



REGULATE ALL COMMODITIES 125 

But profiteering is by no means confined to food ; the evil 
is nation-wide. The people generally appreciate the danger, 
and feel the outrage of this situation as strongly as these 
men do, and the demand for "one law for all" is a char- 
acteristic expression of this feeling. They look to the gov- 
ernment to finish what it has begun by putting a stop to 
this great evil thru regulating all vital commodities. 

The President himself says, ''There is such profiteering 
now and the information in regard to it is available and 
indisputable. ' ' 

It is not an idle boast that these union farmers would 
divide their last bushel. Nearly every Kansas farmer has 
scraped his bins this spring and given up every pound of 
grain he had been reserving for seed, that the needs of our 
Allies might be met. They are doing their utmost to win 
the war. Under the most discouraging condition in 50 
years, the farmers of Kansas have raised and are soon to 
harvest probably the third largest wheat crop in the history 
of the state. 

I am passing this ' ' brief " on to you, as I have others, not 
as a criticism of what you have or have not been able to do 
with your herculean task, but to send it where it will re- 
ceive sincere and earnest consideration and will help you to 
bring about action correcting these abuses. Respectfully. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



THE GOUGERS UNDOING WHAT KANSAS 
HAS DONE. 

A Letter to the President, July 27, 1918. 

My dear Mr. President : — Pomona Grange, with a mem- 
bership of farmers from all the local granges of Johnson 
county, this state, has recently sent me a memorial to for- 
ward to you. I enclose a copy. 

These farmers earnestly urge me to use every means with 



126 THE FIRST MAN REGULATED 

the President and with Congress to abolish price discrim- 
ination against farmers, either by removing the fixed price 
on farm products or by fixing a fair price, on a par with 
the price of these products, on all forms of implements and 
all articles necessary in farming, such as coal and clothing, 
and to enforce this fixed price as rigidly as the prices fixed 
on farm products. 

The memorial, you will notice, puts emphasis on the 
strong feeling among farmers that a great injury is being 
done to their industry by fixing the price upon wheat at a 
"low figure," when the law of supply and demand would 
justify a much higher price, if for no other reason than 
the greatly increased cost of seeding, harvesting, threshing, 
and marketing, and — by comparison — the enormously high 
prices farmers are compelled to pay for farm machinery, 
labor, feed and land, and everything a farmer needs for his 
farm or family. 

To cite a few instances : 

The farmers of the United States virtually are required 
to give 7 pounds of wheat to obtain 1 pound of crackers. 

Because cotton and cotton mills are not under regulation, 
a farmer 's wife must pay for the commonest kind of cotton 
goods a price three to six times above the normal. 

' * The prices set on our products, ' ' a wheat farmer wi'ites 
me, "would be all right, if they would bring us enough to 
pay for our necessities. What we might make on wheat is 
now taken from us in advance." 

The first man to be regulated by the government, as we 
know, was the farmer. Since then the profiteers of big and 
little business have undertaken to finish the job of regulat- 
ing him. 

The West consented patriotically to have the prices of its 
principal products regulated. But the West can continue 
to produce these products at the regulated price only in 
case the prices of the necessities at which its wage earners 
and producers are compelled to buy, also are regulated, and 
regulated as strictly as their products are regulated. 



SPEEDY PRICE REGULATION 127 

No one who knows them, and is where he can see what 
they are doing, can help but be convinced our people are 
deeply and earnestly patriotic. The average farmer is about 
100 per cent patriotic, and works all the time at his job of 
patriotism, but unfortunately he is finding that patriotism, 
however loyally backed-up by industry and enthusiasm, will 
not pay his bills, and he must live if he is to continue to 
help his government win the war. 

Much the same situation exists among the common labor- 
ers of the Middle "West. At a recent meeting in this city of 
the Federated Labor Union this entire body went on record 
as unanimously pledging its loyalty to the government, de- 
claring it would do its best to keep the wheels of industry 
moving, but also declaring that thru profiteering, extending 
even to rents, conditions had become intolerable, and it was 
impossible to feed and clothe their families at the present 
scale of wage. 

These men have had one small increase of pay within the 
last three years — long ago far-outdistanced by the prices of 
living. They are the men hardest hit by the high prices. 
The profiteer may be hurting you and me, but he is slaying 
these men and their families by inches. I fear that unless 
we have somewhat speedily a price regulation of the neces- 
sities of life, or a living wage for these men, that an exodus 
of our common laborers to Eastern cities, where wages are 
higher, will result. 

Your recent admonition to Congress in regard to prof- 
iteering and the danger of inflation thru unequal war tax- ■ 
ation, has the strong approval of every Kansan. Our people 
will back you on this to the limit, and let me say, too, they 
will support every measure of yours for the winning of the 
war. 

I am convinced our continued fitness in the Middle West 
depends on a speedy solution of the profiteering problem 
and the financing of the war, or on a solution of the prob- 



128 LABORERS HARD HIT 

lem of price regulation. A practical solution of either will 
strengthen us for the trials and demands of the war. 
Our great wish is to do more instead of less. 
FaiJthfuUy yours, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



FARMERS FAIL TO OFT PRICE GUARANTEED. 

From a Letter to the National Food Administrator, 
Angust 3, 1918. 

Dear Mr. Hoover : — From numerous points about the state 
I am receiving urgent complaints from farmers relative to 
the price paid them for wheat by grain dealers and elevator 
companies. These complaints are so general that they force 
the conclusion that at many places the grain growers are 
not getting a fair deal; and that buyers are taking more 
than the legitimate profit. This letter is a sample of many : 

The farmers of this vicinity think they are not getting a square 
deal and a good many of them have asked me to write you about 
it. Our wheat is all grading No. 1 and is certainly fine, but the 
elevators in our two towns will pay only $2.04 to $2.05 for it. The 
cost of shipping is around 9 cents a bushel, shrink and everything. 
This No. 1 wheat is selling on the Kansas City market at from 
$2.25 to $2.33 a bushel, so it looks as if they were taking excess 
profits off of the farmers. What can we do about it? 

R. 1. Melvern, Kan. A. L. ROBINSON. 

It is asserted in many localities that local dealers are not 
paying and have not paid at any time since harvest the full 
guaranteed minimum. In the last few days the price has 
dropped from 5 to 10 cents, the buyers offering in explana- 
tion the claim that they are obliged to sell wheat in Kansas 
.City at 2^2 cents under the guaranteed minimum. 

The majority of our wheat growers are forced to sell their 
wheat at threshing time, and as a matter of course are 
greatly disturbed. Only the men who have good yields are 
making any money on this year's crop. 



FAIRNESS TO WHEAT GROWERS 129 

Is the Food Administration taking any steps to protect 
the grain raisers ? Are there government buyers in Kansas 
City or in the wheat belt who will sustain the market and 
redeem the government pledge? 

I believe it very urgently necessary that you immediately 
and thoroly investigate these complaints and remedy them. 
The President having declined to increase the price for next 
harvest, notwithstanding the greatly increased, and increas- 
ing cost of production, it is more than ever necessary that 
our Avheat growers get absolutely what is coming to them at 
the present price, which is a low one. I am sure you will 
appreciate the desirabilit}^ of doing everything possible to 
maintain the good will of the wheat growers at a time when 
they are preparing for the fall planting. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



CURB THE MEAT TRUST. 
A Letter to the President, August 17, 1918. 

My dear Mr. President: — The indictment of the Packers' 
Trust by the Federal Trade Commission is convincing and 
conclusive. Kansas, which has felt its strong grip for years, 
urges the importance of stringent measures to protect the 
country from this powerful and rapacious combination. It 
considers the five reforms suggested in the report of the 
Federal Trade "Commission for bringing about fair markets 
for producers and fair prices for consumers important and 
necessary steps in the right direction, by no means too 
drasfic nor far-reaching in the effort to cope with this bold, 
viciously predatory and short-sighted monopoly. It ap- 
proves of your wisdom in making this report public. 

In Kansas we have thousands of acres without a hoof on 
them, because for years, and with few exceptions, farmers 
made so little money, or have lost so much, in raising or 
feeding livestock for market, that the business has become 



130 IMPAIRING SOIL FERTILITY 

too hazardous for the average farmer to engage in it to the 
extent he should. 

On the other hand, the history of our once well-to-do 
l)reeders of fine stock is a record of dispersed herds, or 
bankruptcy. 

During all these years of disaster and ruin in our live- 
stock industry, the people have had to pay higher and 
higher prices for meat, so high at one time within the last 
decade, as you know, that in the cities the people spon- 
taneously came together and organized anti-meat eating 
clubs. This popular rising the packers were quick to head 
off by speedily, tho gradually, lowering prices, and con- 
tinuing this policy for weeks afterward. 

It is no secret in Kansas, nor in any agricultural state, 
that the Packers' Trust is compelling the American farmer 
to use up and impair the most vital source of our national 
welfare and prosperity, the fertility of the soil, instead of 
conserving it by a carefully balanced system of farming, in- 
cluding livestock as well as grain. We can have no per- 
manent system of agriculture under present conditions. 

While the nation's most vital interests have been suffer- 
ing in this way at the hands of this greedy monopoly, the 
people of Kansas, and of every agricultural state, have 
noted with further misgivings and alarm the successful 
campaign of the big packing companies to dominate the 
export meat products of the three great South American 
countries ; also the steady extension of this control to dairy, 
poultry and other food products, to tanneries and the 
leather supply, in the United States, including the gradual 
absorption of the canneries of Alaska and the Pacific Coast. 

Kansas knows the Packers' Trust for what it has become, 
and wliat it will become unless its grip is broken — a menace 
to our national welfare and a threat to neighbor nations. 
Its people arc convinced they cannot truly prosper unless 
the power of this combine is taken over or it is stringently 



HIGH CORN AND LOW PORK 131 

controlled by the government. They will support you 
unanimously and enthusiastically in any and every policy 
likely to accomplish so tremendously beneficial a result. 
Faithfully yours, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



A GUARANTY THAT FAILED TO GUARANTEE. 

A Letter to the Federal Food Administrator, Oct. 19, 1918. 

Dear Mr. Hoover: — Let me ask how a farmer can be in- 
sured against loss by a price guarantee of $15.50 on a 
product which has cost him about $20.80 to create? 

Our swine raisers learn with something like amazement 
that the National Agricultural Advisory Committee in a 
report submitted to the Food Administration, recommends 
a minimum price for hogs of $15.50 at Chicago be fixed for 
the war. 

The September 1 report of the United States Department 
of Agriculture shows a corn crop for the entire country, 88 
million bushels below the 10-year average. Demand is 
great and prices high. With corn costing about $2 a bushel 
shipped to farmers in the Southwest, in the widespread 
region in which the crop was burned up this year, and cost- 
ing nominally about $1.60 a bushel in carlots f. o. b. Kansas 
City, the impossibility of fitting a hog for market at any 
such price as $15.50 is beyond question. \ 

Last fall, when the Food Administration called in com- 
petent authorities to fix a price for hogs sufficient to guar- 
antee farmers against loss in raising them, the verdict of 
these experts was that wlien 100 pounds of live hogs did not 
buy 12 bushels of corn, swine production declined, and the 
price guarantee should be based on a ratio of 13 to 1, if the 
government wished to increase production. 

With corn of medium quality at $1.60 wholesale at point 
of shipment in the Southwest, a minimum of $20.80 for 



132 A LOSING BUSINESS 

hogs would be none too much. And here comes this ad- 
visory committee and decides that $15.50 at Chicago would 
be a fair price to the producer ! 

I have a letter from one of the leading stock raisers of 
Southern Kansas, which is only one of many of a similar 
nature received by me during the last week. He says : 

The corn we are feeding our hogs has been shipped in from 
Kansas City, the nearest point where corn can be bought, and the 
cost is $2 a bushel. Let us take the price of $15.50 at Chicago for 
hogs that Professor Cotton has so magnanimously set. Who can 
grow and fatten hogs at that price on $2 corn and high priced 
labor? He might just as well have made the guarantee $10 or $5. 

As for helping the country or the Allies, the farmers as a class 
have done their part, and are still willing to. In fact, the money 
for the war has come out of the soil, the farmers have dug it up. 
But when we read of the unprecedented profits of the packers, we 
fail to see where the patriotism comes in in raising hogs for them 
to juggle with at an actual loss to ourselves. It seems too bad 
that, after price-fixing committees have seen that we are not prof- 
iteers, they never fail to kick us in the slats. 

Arkansas City, Kan. J. A. BOYLAN. 

This appears to be the general attitude in regard to the 
recommendation of the advisory committee. 

A farmer may be ever so eager to give his life, his labor, 
or his substance to his country, but if he cannot get as much 
for his products as they cost him, he must quit. The aver- 
age farmer does not possess a large bank account. He does 
not even own his land. And no farmer in moderate circum- 
stances can farm long if the balance is on the wrong side of 
the ledger. 

Unfortunately for the world, the growing of food cannot 
simply be made a matter of patriotism. It has to be a ques- 
tion of dollars and cents. What is still worse, the fixing of 
an unfair or impossible low price on farm products, not 
only is an affront to the patriotic men engaged in this vital 
industry, but must unfailingly operate to defeat their 
efforts and go to make a shortage inevitable sooner or later. 



A CRITICAL SITUATION 133 

I have tried to put the case plainly to you as the farmer 
sees it, that the Food Administration may not in any cir- 
cumstances be deceived or illy advised in a matter so 
important. ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



BAR THE DOOR AGAINST PROFIT WOLVES. 

A Letter to the Federal Food Administrator, Oct. 5, 1918. 

Dear Mr. Hoover:— It seems altogether plain that not- 
withstanding* what has been done, or is being done to stabil- 
ize prices, the situation in regard to the necessities of living 
is continually growing more critical. 

In July, in the height of the growing season, when it is 
customary for most prices to decline, we had this year 
within 30 days, the large, if not unprecedented average in- 
crease in prices of 3 per cent. If this could happen in July, 
what increases may we not look for in the autumn and win- 
ter months? 

The outlook for the coming winter, it seems to me, is 
dreadfully ominous. We may even have food riots. Effec- 
tive measures of control must speedily be found, if we are 
to have any sort of limit to profiteering. 

England, apparently, is the only country at war that has 
been able approximately to control the human wolves who 
choose to make money by robbing a war-burdened people's 
stomachs. In this emergency it may be well for us to take 
a leaf from her experience. 

Unless sternly restrictive measures are adopted, I fear we 
shall have this winter not simply rampant profiteering, but 
such an orgy of profit-taking, and such deprivation and 
suffering in American homes, as this generation never has 
known. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



BRING THE BOYS HOME. 
A Telegram to the Secretary of War, November 30, 1918. 

My dear Mr. Baker: — I wish to urge the early release 
from military duty of every American soldier not urgently 
needed abroad. Just now every agricultural state in the 
Union needs its farmers back on the land as urgently, if 
not more urgently, than these men once were needed in the 
trenches. So far no Kansas troops have been included in 
the divisions soon to be returned from the war zone. If we 
are to feed 200 million Europeans the coming year until 
stricken Europe can get on its feet, it makes food produc- 
tion in the United States as urgent as were munitions in the 
dark days of the war. It seems apparent that by meeting 
this food emergency abroad we shall not simply prevent 
widespread suffering and loss of life, but forestall anarchy 
and speed up the readjustment of Europe on which so 
largely depends good times instead of hard times here at 
home. 

I cite these facts to urge that provision be made that the 
men and boys in the National Guard, in the National Army 
in Europe, and in the camps in this country, who came 
from farms, be at once returned and mustered out by their 
local draft boards. Kansas has 81,477 men in the service. 
In normal times 65,000 men from out of the state are re- 
quired to supplement our own farm labor. Kansas has just 
finished sowing a world-record planting of wheat, more 
than 10 million acres, and skilled farm labor as early as 
February 1 next, will be imperatively needed. 

I am also moved to appeal to your sense of justice of 
what is due to the women in American homes, and likewise 
to the welfare and future of the men now in Europe where 
camp routine and police duty have superseded active war- 
fare. I am sure 3^ou yourself must be convinced that the 

134 



THE PERILS OF PEACE 135 

longer we keep these men away from home the harder it 
will be for them to get their old jobs back; and that the 
longer the nation's best workers are kept out of harness, 
and American families remain disrupted, the worse we shall 
fare at home. This hurt goes deep. Furthermore, there are 
perils of peace almost more terrible than war when great 
armies end a conflict demanding the utmost endurance from 
every man, and suddenly have no other activity left than 
the monotony of marking time at some camp, or of doing 
police duty. Therefore I voice the great hope of thousands 
of firesides all over the land, that the demobilizing of our 
overseas forces be conducted as rapidly as possible. At very 
least, let me urge that the War Department provide for 
taking from the ranks for immediate return, the men who 
now are so greatly needed on the farms, and who at best can 
now do little more overseas than perform the simplest mili- 
tary duty. 

I do not doubt you have all these matters in mind, if not 
provided for. But I feel it important that you should know 
how vitally they affect us in the agricultural West. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



EMPTY THE MILITARY CAMPS. 

A Letter to the Secretary of War, December 14, 1918. 

My dear Mr. Baker: — By way of emphasizing the plea 
made in my former letter urging the early release from 
military duty abroad and from the camps in this country of 
every American soldier not urgently needed, especially the 
men from agricultural states, I am making a Kansas farm- 
er's letter just received, a part of this letter. It expresses 
definitely what many others are writing to me daily and 
gives most valid reasons for the request it prefers. The 
writer says : 

I notice you have made a strong appeal for the return of the 
troops from Europe, and I am with you on that, but I wish you 



136 YOUNG MEN NEEDED AT HOME 

would make a still stronger appeal for the return to their homes 
of the soldiers in the cantonments in this country. It would 
gladden the hearts and relieve the minds of many fathers and 
mothers whose days and nights are spent in anxiety for fear of 
the death messages that come to so many of them these days from 
the camps. In this little community we have recently had three 
such messages, one from San Antonio, one from Lawrence, and 
one from Funston. All three were as fine young men as ever grew 
to manhood in Kansas. 

Now the war is over, and the purpose for which they enrolled 
themselves has been fought out and won, why "not let these boys 
come home? The shops and the farms need their help. I have a 
nephew at Kelley Field No. 2, San Antonio, who was fanning for 
himself, and when he enlisted hired his brother to look after his 
interest on the farm, or as much of it as he could manage. I want 
to tell you. Governor, that boy is needed right here. Many thou- 
sand other boys have done as he did, and should be mustered out 
as soon as possible. 

While the war was on I had no patience with the knocker or the 
slacker, as I believed it was the duty of every man and woman to 
get behind the government and fight to a finish. Now that has 
been done, we are anxious as well as eager to see the boys come 
marching home. So if you can do anything to speed up the home- 
coming of these boys, you will earn the gratitude, not only of the 
people of Kansas, but of other states. 

R. 2, Republic, Kan. V. T. STROM. 

Away from tlie dust and crowding of the cantonments, 
there can be no (juestion, I think, that these boys would 1)e 
much safer from the more or less deadly winter diseases of 
the camps and the prevailing influenza. Illnesses would be 
much less likely amid their wholesome home surroundings, 
and if incurred would be detected and treated earlier with 
better chances of recovery under the clieerful influence of 
home and its loving care. 

Furthermore, the West has never had such need of its 
young farmers. Active farming begins in the Southwest 
early in February. Spring planting depends absolutel.y on 
having these young farmers on the job as soon as they can 
possibly be mustered out. Useful, vitally important work 
is awaiting them here and is waiting for them. 



WEST NEEDS YOUNG FARMERS 137 

Besides these reasons, urgent enough in themselves, the 
nation owes its fathers and mothers a debt of gratitude it 
never can repay, and I am sure you will agree that a prompt 
response to their wishes in this particular by those in au- 
thority is the least that can be asked of us at this time. 
ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



LET THE SOLDIERS KEEP THEIR UNIFORMS. 

From a Letter to the War Department, December 20, 1918. 

These men are returning to civil life, after playing a most 
magnificent part in the greatest war in history. They have 
In'ought new and undying glory to our flag. Naturally a 
feeling of deep pride attaches to the uniform worn by them 
while in the service. Memories cling to their soldier clothes 
Avhieh nothing but death can erase. So that, as a matter of 
sentiment alone, I think they should keep their uniforms. 

But there are other and possibly more practical reasons. 
There will be many reunions, celebrations and gatherings 
of a patriotic nature at which it will be entirely fitting and 
appropriate for soldiers of the world war to appear in uni- 
form. Furthermore, I cannot believe that a uniform worn 
three months by a soldier and then turned back to the gov- 
ernment, could again be made suitable for regular wear 
without the, expenditure of more than its worth in repairs. 
Many of the men disposed of their civilian clothing when 
they entered the service. It will be necessary for them to 
wear their uniforms steadily for several weeks while earn- 
ing money with which to purchase other wearing apparel. 
But if a soldier knew he was to retain his uniform, he would 
naturally be more zealous in its care. After a few weeks it 
would be worn only on special occasions and would serve its 
purpose for several years. • 

I think as a matter of plain justice, every soldier who is 
honorably discharged from the United States army should 
be permitted to keep one complete unifonn, and I should 



138 CHILDREN AND THE RED CROSS 

like to appeal to you strongly to see that steps are taken 
which will lead to the issuance of such orders. I am sure 
the people of the nation, who have been so generous in pro- 
viding the money with which to purchase clothing and 
equipment for their soldiers, would approve such action. 
With assurance of high personal esteem, I am, 

Very respectfully, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



CHILDREN'S PART IN THE WAR. 
Junior Red Cross Proclamation. 

Pursuant to the request of the advisory committee of the 
Junior Red Cross of the southwestern division, that the gov- 
ernors of the five states in this division recognize by procla- 
mation the Junior Red Cross as the one official organiza- 
tion for war relief activities in pur schools, I take pleasure 
in proclaiming for this organization full recognition in 
Kansas. 

In this connection, let me urge thruout Kansas that 
school boards and superintendents consolidate all war ac- 
tivities in our schools with the Junior Red Cross work. 
Such activities include food conservation, the sale of thrift 
stamps and certificates, subscriptions to Liberty bonds, sup- 
port of the Y. M. C. A. and whatever duties the pupils of 
our schools may be invited to undertake, unifying for the 
work of the war all our people and resources. 

The story of the Red Cross should be told to the pupils of 
the schools, the history of the organization and the noble 
work it has done and is doing in behalf of humanity. There 
is no part of our people who naturally respond so enthusi- 
astically to the humanitarian and idealistic objects of the 
Red Cross as our school children. Everywhere they desire 



CITIZENSHIP FOR GENERAL WOOD 139 

to link themselves with the nation 's efforts to win the world 
war, and opportunity is here given them to do so with real 
effect. 

Let our 300,000 school children be enlisted in the Junior 
Red Cross and so permit them to be a real and vital factor 
in the task the nation has taken up to preserve all that 
democracy cherishes, and to safeguard future generations. 

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and 
caused to be affixed the great seal of the state of Kansas. 

Done at Topeka, the capitol, this seventh day of Febru- 
ary, A. D., 1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



PROCLAMATION CONFERRING CITIZENSHIP 
UPON GENERAL LEONARD WOOD. 

State of Kansas, Governor's Office. 

Know all men by these presents. 

Inasmuch as the life of a state, its strength and virtue 
and moral worth are directly dependent upon the char- 
acter of the citizens who compose it, and 

Inasmuch as it is a solemn obligation imposed upon the 
Governor of the state to promote and advance the interests 
and well being of the commonwealth in every way consist- 
ent witli due regard for the rights and privileges of sister 
states, and 

Whereas, the soldier, Leonard Wood, Major General in 
the United States Army and now commandant at Camp 
Funston, has shown by his daily life, by his devotion to 
duty, by his high ideals and by his love of country, that 
he is a high-minded man after our own hearts, foursquare 
to all the world, one good to know. 

Now, therefore, I, Arthur Capper, Gvernor of the State 
of Kansas, do hereby declare the said Major General Leon- 



140 THANKSGIVING DAY, 1918 

ard Wood to be, in character and in ideals, a true Kansan, 
and by virtue of the esteem and affection the people of 
Kansas bear him, I do furthermore declare him to be to all 
intents and purposes a citizen of this state, and as such 
entitled to speak the Kansas language, to follow Kansas 
customs, and to be know as citizen-extraordinary. 

In witness whereof I have hereunto subscribed my name 
and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State of 
Kansas. 

Done at Topeka, the state capital, the nineteenth day of 
December, A. D., 1917. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



THANKSGIVING DAY PROCLAMATION, 1918. 

From the hearts of the American people there is rising 
unbidden, a mighty hymn of thanksgiving. We should be 
poor in thanks and poorer still in spirit, if America's an- 
nual day of Thanksgiving did not this year find us truly a 
happy and a grateful nation. 

We have again been found fit to fulfill the high purposes 
of Americanism in the greatest crisis hour in world history. 
Our young men have faced death with smiling faces. They 
have made the supreme sacrifice, asking one question and 
only one, with their last breath — "Are we still advancing?" 
The name of America shines with brighter, holier luster 
before all the world because of the perfection and nobility 
of their manhood and the mercies of our bounty. The world 
has never seen finer fighting men. God grant we may seal 
their sacrifices with a league of peace. 

Now, therefore, I, Arthur Capper, governor of the state 
of Kansas, in accordance with a gracious and honored cus- 
tom, do hereby proclaim Thursday, November 28, as Thanks- 
giving day, and call upon our people, in their usual places 



THE LOVE OF HUMANITY 141 

of worship, or wherever they may be, to offer up a prayer 
to Almighty God for the victory which has come to oiir 
cause and for the many blessings we have enjoyed as a 
people during this momentous year in our history. 

Let us lift up our hearts in community singing with 
thanksgiving and praise, that violence and might cannot in 
this world overcome the moral forces that are the founda- 
tion of our national government and political faith. 

Let us render thanks to the God of justice who overrules 
wicked rulers, and who has again made America His instru- 
ment in hurling back the forces of autocracy and oppres- 
sion, greed and cruelty. 

Ijct us observe our national day of thanksgiving not in 
the spirit of boasting and of vanity and pride, but of grati- 
tude that we have been found fit to fulfill the purposes of 
Americanism in the world's crisis hour and that in this 
gathering up of our forces we have had a larger and a 
deeper vision of our unity and our invincible power when 
called forth by a cause worthy of America. 

Let us give thanks to the Giver of all good that the ex- 
ample of America is being looked up to and followed in all 
parts of the world, and in this time of testing that Ameri- 
canism and democracy are being extended as at no former 
time in history. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



RED CROSS ROLL CALL. 
A Proclamation. 

While representatives of the great nations lately in the 
deadly throes of actual war, are gathering around the peace 
table, it is given to the people of America to show that it 
was the high ideals of democracy and the love of humanity, 
which led them into war, and not emotionalism nor merely 
hatred of an arrogant and impudent foe. 

As we fought for the sake of humanity we must show no 



142 FATHER AND SON WEEK 

dimiuished zeal and fervor, now that the storm of passion 
has passed, in our tender ministrations to those who bore 
the burden of the battle, to their families and dependents, 
to the stricken people of Europe and to our own people who 
are undertaking the gigantic task of rebuilding a world. 
Suffering and sorrow do not cease with the declaration of 
peace. The aftermath of war carries its woes only less than 
those of war itself. 

To alleviate these woes, to smooth the way of soldiers and 
sailors readjusting themselves to civil life, to help the civil 
population at home and abroad most quickly regain and 
establish normal conditions of life, is the function of the 
American Red Cross. Its high mission must appeal to every 
American, and its Christmas roll call must meet with en- 
thusiastic response in every American home. 

Therefore, I, Arthur Capper, do hereby proclaim the 
week of December 16 to 24, inclusive, as Red Cross Roll Call 
week in the state of Kansas, and earnestly call upon all the 
people of the state, men, women and children, to enroll as 
active members of this great association. 

Carry on. 

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and 
caused to be affixed the great seal of the state of Kansas. 
Done at Topeka, the capitol, this 12th day of December, 
A. D., 1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



FATHER AND SON WEEK. 

A Proclamation. 

The President has designated the week of Lincoln 's birth- 
day as Father and Son Week all over our nation. The ex- 
perience of European nations at war convinces us that this 
is a timely movement. With juvenile delinquency increased 
over 200 per cent in England and 500 per cent in Germany, 
and some alarming indications of delinquency increases in 



THE NECESSITY OF SACRIFICE 143 

our own country, it is necessary to consider the welfare of 
our boys. In our own state there has been an increase of 28 
per cent in the court records of juvenile cases, and from 
many points over the state a larger increase in the number 
of cases handled by the officers about which no record was 
made. 

We must give no less attention and not a cent less of 
money to our 2 million boys under arms, but we must give 
equal attention to our 8 million boys at home. 

The National Father and Son "Week will give opportunity 
for strengthening the home ties with the boys under arms 
and will emphasize to communities, churches and parents 
the duties of each to the boys. 

This movement will be thoroughly promoted in this state 
by the State Sunday School association and the Y. M. C. A. 
organizations. 

Therefore, I, Arthur Capper, governor of the state of 
Kansas, hereby set aside the week of February 11 to 17 as 
Father and Son Week, urging all communities, churches 
and parents to observe it, giving concentrated attention to 
•the needs of our boys at home, and emphasizing to both 
father and son the duties of each to the other which their 
relationship sanctifies. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



UNITED WAR WORK PROCLAMATION. 

To re-establish the cherished ideal of our government ; to 
bring about freedom from oppression thruout the world ; to 
defeat a foe that threatens the liberties of all peoples and 
ruthlessly destroys the lives of women and children and 
men, it is necessary that millions of the best young man- 
hood of America must sacrifice their business, their pleas- 
ures, their very lives. 

It is necessary that other men and women go overseas, 
separating themselves from their vocations and domestic 



144 THE PRIVILEGE OF GIVING 

ties in order to carry the influences of the home, society and 
the church to the men in the fighting lines. 

To supply the void in the lives of the men in our coun- 
try's service the United States government has duly author- 
ized seven organizations to look after the welfare of the men 
in the service. The organizations are : Young Men 's Chris- 
tian Association, Young Women's Christian Association, 
National Catholic War Council, Jewish Welfare Board, 
War Camp Community Service, American Library Asso- 
ciation, Salvation Army. 

These several organizations have accepted and are dis- 
charging the trust in a manner that has commanded the 
admiration of the world and the everlasting gratitude of 
every man in the service and those left at home. 

The giving of moral and financial support to this work is 
an especial privilege given to us at home, by which we are 
able to take directly a small part in the great conflict for 
humanity. It is a privilege everyone should enjoy and ac- 
cept to the uttermost. 

Therefore, I, Arthur Capper, Governor of Kansas, do 
hereby proclaim to the citizens of the state of Kansas, that 
during the week beginning November 10, every American' 
should give of his strength and his means to the fullest 
extent to the United War Work, that these allied organiza- 
tions may continue to carry on the work already allotted to 
them and extend it wlierever needed. Our men in the ser- 
vice must experience no interruption of communication 
with home and no modification of this great morale-making 
work which has definitely entered into their lives and has 
brought to them happiness and courage. 

I urge that no person neglect his duty to those fighting 
for him in our training camps and overseas during the com- 
ing week. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 

United War Work Campaign, November 11, 1918. 



FOURTH LIBERTY LOAN PROCLAMATION. 

Kansas is asked to subscribe to the fourth Liberty loan 62 
million dollars in round figures. 

This appears a large undertaking, but I have no hesita- 
tion in predicting that as Kansas has never yet failed to 
exceed the share apportioned to it, whether in men or 
money, it will not be found wanting at this critical time. 

Our real duty is to subscribe promptly. Let us not wait 
for a ' ' drive. ' ' "We do not have to be driven to sustain our 
country in its hour of trial. Let us volunteer and make our 
subscriptions to the maximum of our ability now. 

We should be inspired by the solemn news from the 
French front, where at this hour thousands of our own 
Kansas troops are engaged in one of the mightiest battles 
of the war. They have not hesitated or held back. When 
the command came to go forward they responded by leaping 
to their duty. Let us respond in the same spirit to our duty 
to sustain them with our money and our credit. 

Let us be mindful also that at this time, with taxes on 
wealth redoubled, the present loan of 6 billion dollars can- 
not be made up by men of wealth. This call is to every man 
and to every family and to every dollar. At this time no 
thought should be in any mind but the success of the fourth 
Liberty loan. 

Now therefore, I Arthur Capper, governor of the state of 
Kansas, call upon every citizen to dedicate his utmost effort 
to the success of this new undertaking of our government to 
the end that it may stand as fresh proof of our faith in our 
cause and in the fine, young American boys who are so 
nobly upholding the principles of right and justice on the 
battle fields of Europe. 

145 



146 THE PLEDGE OF RENEWED LOYALTY 

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto subscribed my 
name and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State 
of Kansas. Done at Topeka, the capitol, this 27th day of 
September, A. D., 1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



FOURTH OF JULY PROCLAMATION. 

A year ago America had entered the Great War and July 
4 was celebrated with deeper solemnity by our people than 
ever before. This year Independence Day finds more than 
a million soldiers in France and Italy, fighting in our name 
the most fateful battles of human freedom. Let us all there- 
fore honor the day by meeting together, by patriotic songs 
and addresses, testifying our loyalty to these soldiers en- 
gaged in our defense and pledging anew our fidelity and 
devotion to the deathless principles upon which our free 
nation was founded. 

Especially should we commend the patriotic movement 
expressed in the memorial to the President from foreign 
born citizens of the United States of all nationalities, an- 
nouncing their intention to celebrate the Fourth of July by 
special observances to testify their love for this nation and 
its present great cause. This worthy purpose has been 
called to public attention by the President at the request of 
the National Defense Council, and I particularly call atten- 
tion to it in Kansas, that there may be co-operation with 
our foreign born residents and in arrangements for observ- 
ance of Independence Day in all places provision may be 
made for their special participation. 

Everywhere let us honor the birth of our government, 
dedicated to human liberty, righteousness and justice, by 
universal observance of Independence Day this year, when 
the spirit of the America of 1776 has spread over all the 
earth and in all nations men are to receive the blessings of 
democracy and of freedom thru the final overthrow on the 



THE NEW SACRIFICE 147 

battlefields of Europe of the hateful doctrine of the divine 
right of any man, family or dynasty to rule over a whole 
people. And at all these patriotic gatherings let the loyalty 
pledge be read for all Avorthy citizens to approve, standing 
with uncoA^ered head. 

In Testimony Wliereof, I have hereunto subscribed my 
hand and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the state. 
Done at Topeka. the capitol, this 28th day of June, A. D., 
1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



WAR SAVINGS DAY. 
A Proclamation. 

Because of the pressing need of men, materials, fuel and 
transportation facilities for the successful prosecution of 
the war, the government has appealed to the people of the 
United States voluntarily to curtail their customary expen- 
ditures by denying themselves luxuries and unnecessary 
comforts, to the end that labor and materials may be re- 
leased for war work. The civilian population who remain 
at home and follow the ordinary pursuits of life, must be 
willing to make sacrifices to support the brave men who 
have so willingly left their homes and offered their lives in 
the cause of Right and Freedom. 

The President of the United States has designated June 
28 as the day upon which we are to give a new token of our 
loyalty to the nation by pledging ourselves to the purchase 
of war savings stamps thruout this year, 

Kansas is expected to pledge on that day purchases of 
stamps to the maturity value of 37 million dollars. Know- 
ing the earnest zeal with which the people of this state have 
entered upon the task before them, I have every confidence 
that we Avill not fall behind our sister states, but will sub- 
scribe more than our quota. To bring the matter more 



148 THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY 

forcibly to public attention I, Arthur Capper, do hereby 
proclaim Friday, June 28, as War Savings Day for the 
state of Kansas, upon which day all persons shall give their 
pledges for war savings stamps at such times and places 
and in such manner as may be appointed by P. W. Goebel, 
war savings director, for this state, acting under the au- 
thority of the Secretary of the Treasury, and pursuant to 
the proclamation of the President of the United States. 

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and 
caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State of Kansas. 
Done at Topeka, the eapitol, this 18th day of June, A. D., 
1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



WAR ANNIVERSARY DAY. 
A Proclamation. 

April 6th marks the first anniversary of America's en- 
trance into the great struggle for world freedom. It is a 
day which will live always in the mind of every true Ameri- 
can and should take its place among the days which are 
glorious in the history of this nation. 

Already the President has designated the day as the be- 
ginning of the campaign for the sale of the third Liberty 
Bonds. Kansas and Kansans will respond to that call in a 
way that will reflect credit upon the state. 

It is fitting and appropriate, and in keeping with the 
patriotism and love of freedom and justice which actuates 
our people in the great struggle they have entered, that we 
should give further evidence on that day of our loyalty to 
the government and of our determination to fight the war 
to a victorious end. 

Therefore, I, Arthur Capper, governor of the state of 
Kansas, do hereby proclaim and designate Saturday, April 
6, as a public holiday in Kansas and call upon the people of 
the state to observe the day in a manner in keeping with all 



A DUTY OF CITIZENSHIP 149 

it means to this nation. I urge that all public buildings 
and places of business be closed during the day and that 
labor be laid aside wherever practicable. I further urge 
that there be the greatest possible display of the flag and 
that the people join in the public patriotic demonstrations 
appropriate to the occasion. 

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and 
caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State of Kansas. 
Done at Topeka, the capitol, this 29th day of March, A. D., 
1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



LIBERTY DAY. 

A Proclamation. 

In order that the people of Kansas may have the oppor- 
tunity of co-operating to the fullest extent in promoting the 
success of the third Liberty Loan campaign, 

And in accordance with the proclamation of the Presi- 
dent of the United States, and the request of the Secretary 
of the Treasury, 

I, Arthur Capper, Governor, do hereby designate Friday, 
April 26, 1918, as Liberty Day in the State of Kansas, and 
urgently request the loyal people of the state to suspend 
ordinary business on the afternoon of that day, and to de- 
vote their entire energies to promoting the success of the 
third Liberty Loan. It is desired by the President that the 
people of the state join in appropriate patriotic demonstra- 
tions calculated to stimulate subscriptions to Liberty Bonds. 
I need not remind the people of Kansas of the vital impor- 
tance of this state subscribing more than its quota to the 
third loan. It is the duty of every individual in this serious 
crisis to do his utmost in the support of the government and 
the cause of humanity for which we fight. Let this day 
mark the high tide of our patriotic endeavor, showing the 



] 50 A PERPETUAL AND SACRED MEMORIAL 

nation and the world that our hearts, our souls, and our 
fortunes are consecrated to the cause of humanity. 

I especially urge that the mayors of cities and other local 
governing authorities in the state make it a special point 
to co-operate in their several localities to celebrate Liberty 
Day. 

In Witness "Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and 
caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State of Kansas. 
Done at Topeka, the capitol, this 23rd day of April, A. D., 
1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



MEMORIAL DAY. 
A Proclamation. 

Whereas, custom, statute and the loving gratitude of a 
patriotic people have set aside the thirtieth day of May as 
a perpetual and sacred memorial to the brave souls of the 
'60s, who fought and died to "make men free," 

I, Arthur Capper, by virtue of the authority reposed in 
me as governor, do hereby proclaim Thursday, the Thirtieth 
day of May, Nineteen Hundred and Eighteen, as Memorial 
Day in the state of Kansas — a day to be observed this year 
with especial reverence. Let not the stress of present-day 
duties lead us to forget the debt we owe to those who pre- 
served the nation's life, or to falter in acknowledging and 
in paying the honor due them. 

The President of the United States has by proclamation 
designated the same day "a day of public humiliation, 
prayer and fasting." I urge and entreat the people of 
Kansas to lay aside so far as possible their usual vocations 
and to give the day to holj^ communion with the Great 
Spirit from whom our help cometh ; to confess with contrite 
hearts and true humility our sins and shortcomings ; to pray 
that as our cause is just and right, it may have the divine 



• PRAISE AND SONG OF OUR FLAG 151 

blessing ; and to beseech Almighty God that we Americans 
of 1918 may be given the grace and strength to acquit our- 
selves as did our fathers in that other struggle for human 
liberty. 

Facing, in no spirit of vain-glory, the responsibilities 
now resting upon this nation, let us pray that we may ever 
realize that our cause will triumph only as we keep our 
hands clean and our hearts pure ; and that we may be given 
the strength to withstand all temptations that will interfere 
with a just and permanent peace among the peoples of the 
earth. 

In Testimony Whereof, I have hereunto subscribed my 
name and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State 
of Kansas. Done at Topeka this 23rd day of May, A. D., 
1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



FLAG DAY PROCLAMATION— 1918. 

Let us not be vainglorious or boastful, but rather .thought- 
ful of that new conflict which we have entered — a conflict 
that is mightier than any we have met — one that will try 
our vast resources — take from us our sons — and which only 
united effort and ceaseless endeavor will win. Let us who 
remain at home give expression to our love of freedom — our 
loyalty for our country— and our hearty indorsement of the 
allied cause by joining in a day of state-wide celebration of 
praise and song for our flag. 

For to us our flag embodies all the hopes and aims of our 
highest ideals. On this day when the stars and stripes for 
the first time in the history of our country fly in foreign 
lands, side by side with the flags of our allies — when our 
Kansas boys are fighting shoulder to shoulder in the 
trenches with the boys of France and England — allied in a 
cause which we know is just — fighting against a foe, cruel, 
unscrupulous, soul cowardly and freedom destroying — 



152 A DAY OF OBSERVANCE 

surely we can without thought of self and with humble 
thanks and honest praises, lay aside our work day tasks for 
a few hours and in public assemblies thruout our state dedi- 
cate anew ourselves to our flag and to those things for 
which it has always stood, and to pledge ourselves anew to 
fight on until all countries enjoy the freedom we have so 
long accepted as our right. 

In accord with the arrangements that will be carried out 
in all states of the Union, I ask that the stars and stripes be 
displayed on every home and public building in Kansas on 
Friday, June 14, and that all public assemblies sing our 
national anthem — "The Star Spangled Banner" — with 
fervor, and renew our vow to stand behind our flag wher- 
ever it may lead us thruout the coming year. 

In Testimony Whereof, I have hereunto subscribed my 
name and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the state. 
Done at Topeka, the capitol, this eighth day of June, A. D., 
1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



LIBERTY LOAN PROCLAMATION. 

The Secretary of the Treasury has announced the cam- 
paign for the third Liberty loan will begin on the first anni- 
versary of the declaration of war, April 6. We should 
make this a day of special observance thruout Kansas and 
give to its celebration a special significance and a practical 
value by inspiring every town, county, and village to over- 
subscribe its quota. 

Let us think of the thousands of our finest young men 
out on the battle front, undergoing the hardships of the 
world's most terrible war, in a desperate struggle with a 
barbarous foe who knows no restraining law, who observes 
no civilized customs, who violates every pledge and breaks 
every humane code. 



LET KANSAS RESPOND 153 

Shall we at home fail to do our part? 

In this appeal to us, the nation does not ask us to sacri- 
fice or give of our means, but only to lend it what funds we 
can, taking bonds of the United States in payment at the 
highest rate of interest paid in more than a generation. 

To every patriotic call since the war began, the response 
of Kansas has exceeded what was asked or expected of the 
state. Now that the treasury needs our subscriptions to the 
third Liberty loan, let us maintain this fine record for the 
sake of our country and of our allies, and for our honor and 
in honor of our sons who are devoting their lives to ful- 
filling what Lincoln called "the last great measure of de- 
votion. ' ' 

I wish to direct special attention to a feature of this loan 
which will make it historic. A national honor flag is to be 
raised in the treasury department at Washington, there to 
remain permanently. On this flag will be recorded the 
result of the subscription campaign in every state. We 
want Kansas to have a place of honor on this permanent 
memorial. Besides the national honor flag the government 
will award honor flags to every town that sells more than 
its quota of Liberty bonds. 

To the second Liberty loan there were in round numbers, 
10 million subscribers. The third Liberty loan must have 
15 million subscribers. 

Kansas must and will respond to this call for a greater 
subscription and a greater number of subscribers. 

To the second Liberty loan this state was asked to sub- 
scribe a minimum of $27,840,000 up to a maximum of $46,- 
400,000. It subscribed $30,104,500 and exceeded the mini- 
mum. This oversubscription was due to the remarkable 
record of seven counties which exceeded their maximum. 
Sixty-five counties, considerably more than a majority of 
all, failed to subscribe even their minimum. While the state 
as a whole went over the minimum of the call, there were 
counties that failed to subscribe more than 25 per cent, 



154 PROTECT OUR BOYS 

others that gave no more than 15 per cent, and one or more 
that subscribed only 10 per cent of the minimum asked. 

These facts are stated because they prove that by effec- 
tive organization and effort Kansas can and will respond 
to this call with subscriptions far exceeding those of the 
second Liberty loan. 

I appeal to every citizen of Kansas to meet this call of the 
nation generously and promptl3^ In these things at least, 
we who remain at home can perform the duty of good citi- 
zenship, tho we do not and perhaps cannot, offer our lives 
to our country in its day of need. 

That our people may show once more their devotion to 
their country and their purpose to stand by and support 
the noble sons Kansas has sent to the battlefield, I hereby 
designate April 6, 1918, as Liberty Loan day in Kansas, 
and earnestly urge every Kansan to co-operate with his 
fellows to the fullest extent on that day, launching a cam- 
paign that will put Kansas far over the top in the third 
Liberty loan. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



A RED CROSS APPEAL. 

At the request of the American Red Cross, I am glad to 
call to the special notice of every Kansas family the effort 
now being made by the Red Cross to collect all over the 
land, fruit pits, especially peach stones and nut shells of 
every kind, and appeal to all our good people in Kansas to 
co-operate with the Red Cross in this necessary war work. 

Communicate with the nearest Red Cross chapter to your 
home and enlist in this work of saving all fruit and nut 
shells, which are vitally necessary to provide carbon in the 
manufacture of gas masks for ouy soldiers. 

The protection of our boys from German gas is one of the 
most humane branches of war work. All must be happy to 
participate in it, no matter in how small a way. You can 



UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER 155 

do so by saving- every fruit pit and every piece of nut shell 
in your home. Do not throw these out, but remember that 
by saving them you will be saving human lives in France, 
saving our boys from agony and permanent loss of sight, 
perhaps. 

Do not look upon this as a small matter. The American 
Red Cross urges you to regard it as a vital matter. The 
Red Cross chapters will collect these articles from the 
homes and business places. Get into communication and 
co-operation with your local Red Cross, and if there is no 
chapter in your immediate neighborhood, telephone to the 
nearest city or town and arrange to help in this humane 
and important work. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 

Topeka, Kan., October 1, 1918, 



UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. 

Honorable Woodrow Wilson, President, 
The White House, Washington, D. C. 

With unbounded confidence in your judgment and 
knowledge of the situation, permit me to say that your re- 
jection of the latest German overtures for an armistice will 
meet with the hearty approval of not less than 99 per cent 
of the people of Kansas. They are practically unanimous 
in the belief that the end for which we fight cannot be at- 
tained by treating with the Hohenzollerns. An uncondi- 
tional surrender on the part of the Central Powers is, in 
their opinion, the first step toward a permanent peace and 
a reconstruction of the governments of the world on a basis 
tliat will make democracy possible. Respectfully yours, 
ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 

Topeka, Kan., October 7, 1918. 

This message, representing the sentiment of the citizens 
of Kansas, was sent to President Wilson, Monday. It was 



156 ABSOLUTE SURRENDER 

concurred in by members of the Supreme Court, state offi- 
cers of Kansas, and visitors at the State House. Everyone 
declared that America could not treat with the Hohenzol- 
lerns and that America and her Allies are now prepared to 
deal a death blow to German militarism for all time. 



NOTHING LESS— ABSOLUTE SURRENDER AND 
ABDICATION. 

Governor Capper's Telegram to the President in Regard to 
Germany's Perfunctory and Hypocritical ''Acceptance." 

Topeka Kansas, Sunday, October 13, 1918. 
To the President, Washington, D. C. : 

With unconditional surrender in our grasp thru the rout 
of the German army and the defection of Bulgaria, Austria 
and Turkey, the sentiment expressed in Kansas is that the 
abdication of the kaiser, or the complete surrender of the 
German army, is an indispensable preliminary to any nego- 
tiations for peace. With high faith in your judgment and 
fuller knowledge, Kansas considers the German reply too 
indefinite on vital points to be acceptable under your often 
declared resolve not to deal in the settlement of peace with 
the Hohenzollern military power. The mere statement in 
the kaiser's note that his chancellor speaks for the German 
people, as well as for the German government, is not here 
considered a sufficient guaranty that your terms have been 
complied with. With the government of Germany still 
under the Hohenzollern dynasty, and the unsurrendered 
German army under command of the kaiser and the Prus- 
sian military power, there is no basis for a satisfactory 
peace. 

After turning the fruitful countries of Europe into a 
desert, and doing to death thousands of inoffensive old men 
and women and children, with a cruelty surpassing the 
Apache Indian, the German government, so far as the Ger- 



HONOE TO PEKSHING 157 

man people know anything about it, mercifully "accepts" 
terms of peace proposed by the Allies. Should the kaiser's 
troops now retire to, or within, the German border, it will 
carry this deception still farther. It will appear their mili- 
tary masters were not so far wrong in their promises. That, 
if this is not a peace with victory, at least it is a "peace 
with honor" and the honors of war, for no foe has set foot 
in Germany. 

Kansas feels the people of Germany must be made to 
know their militarists have been whipped, and that bring- 
ing this fact home to them should be one of the preliminary 
conditions of peace. Nothing can be done to Germany 
which in any measure can atone for the crimes committed 
in its name. But the German people must know that the 
plan of their militarists to become masters of the world has 
failed ignominiously. Every German regiment should be 
required to lay do^ni its arms and surrender formally to 
an ally commander. Then, Kansas feels the allied armies 
should give the German people a vision of the meaning of 
a world in arms by marching thru to Berlin and camping 
on German soil while the peace terms are being concluded. 
Very respectfully, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



PERSHING DAY. 

Upon the request of the national council of ' ' The Ameri- 
can Patriots" and in conjunction with the citizens of other 
states, the people of Kansas are requested to observe Satur- 
day, October 19, as Pershing liberty loan day. 

"We can give no finer expression to the enthusiasm which 
every American must feel when he thinks of the magnifi- 
cent part that Pershing and our American soldiers have 
played and are playing in the world conflict, than by mak- 
ing the day set apart in the General's honor, a red letter 



158 KANSAS AMERICANISM 

and riicord breaking day in subscriptions to the fourth loan. 
In no other Avay can we so adequately show our apprecia- 
tion of the valor of our men and the genius of their intrepid 
commander. 

Let Kansas again show her unswerving faith and loyal 
devotion. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 

Topeka, Kan., October 18, 1918. 



CHRISTMAS GREETING TO KANSAS YANKS. 
ruhlished in Paris Edition of Chicago Tribune. 

To Kansas Men Overseas: 

On the greatest Christmas since the first Christmas 
brought peace on earth and good will toward men, the home 
folks and the home state, in thought and spirit, reach their 
hands across the sea to give you a hearty Christmas greet- 
ing, and even now are planning to celebrate your home- 
coming with feasting and joy. Kansas is as proud that you 
were privileged to play a large part in the greatest drama 
of history, as it is grateful that many of you were spared. 
It rejoices that Kansas men, fighting for a Kansas prin- 
ciple, have again thru the highest courage, devotion and 
sacrifice added luster to the traditions of a state which has 
always proved its sturdy Americanism, and have helped 
achieve a victory that will bless the world for all time. 
May the Lord love and keep you. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



IN APPRECIATION OF ELECTION TO THE 
UNITED STATES SENATE. 

From the Topeka Daily Capital. 

I should be less than human "v^ere I not greatly moved by 
Kansas' overwhelming vote .of confidence November 5, 
when it voted I should represent it in the Senate of the 
United States by more than twice the majority the state had 
ever before given a candidate for Senator. I owe this to the 
voluntary support of loyal friends and good citizens every- 
where. It is a most handsome testimonial of their approval 
and encouragement, and my earnest wish is that I shall not 
disappoint them. 

But the election meant more than the personal endorse- 
ment of any candidate, it was a triumph for good politics. 
Kansas again most emphatically gave notice that it de- 
mands Service from its public servants, and that it will 
smash political scheming and trafficking wherever it shows 
its head. 

I think it was a serious mistake on the part of the Presi- 
dent to issue a partisan appeal, especially just before elec- 
tion, but I believe the Republicans in Congress will be broad 
enough to give him the strongest possible support in putting 
thru the war and the peace program, and in meeting the 
problems of readjustment and reconstruction. My duty is 
a public duty. I shall go to Washington as an American, 
not as a partisan. 

No man can say in advance what he will do. I make no 
promises of accomplishment. I can only say what I wish to 
do and what I shall try to bring about. The demand of the 
hour is for team work in high places, for the people will do 
their share. The results will depend on the quality of the 
team work. The country is carrying a staggering burden. 
I shall do my best to stop the huge waste of its resources. 

159 



160 PLEDGES AS SENATOR 

I shall try to end the prostituting of its public service by 
the spoilsmen. I shall seek in every way to promote gen- 
uine governmental efficiency. This has now become abso- 
lutely essential to our welfare and progress. It must be 
attained somehow. I shall strive for fair apportionment of 
the nation's great load of taxes. I shall try to put an end 
to the profiteering of the people by predatory monopolies. 
I shall work for federal control of natural resources, and I 
shall do my best to strike the shackles from the most vital 
industry of all, the business of farming. Furthermore, I 
shall lose no opportunity to make booze forever an outcast 
in the United States. 

Sooner or later these things will be accomplished because 
thej^ must be done. But no man can bring them about 
alone. I can only do my utmost to speed the day of their 
accomplishment. It is human to err. T shall make mis- 
takes. But they will not be errors of the heart, nor of hon- 
esty of purpose. I shall do my best to do something that 
will help us all. 

ARTHUR CAPPER. 

November 16, 1918. 



JEWISH-ARMENIAN RELIEF. 
A Proclamation. 

Among all the millions who have suffered at the hands 
of the oppressor in the Great War none have been more 
sorely tried than the Jews and the Armenians. They have 
been driven to starvation, have been denied sufficient 
clothing and have been ground between the upper and 
nether mill stone by friend and foe alike. These races have 
contributed in a most substantial way to the prosperity and 
advancement of all the nations of the earth. No races have 
been more patriotic, more liberty-loving. Jews have fought 
under the flag of every nation in the name of liberty and 
justice for mankind. In the present war thousands of Jews 



A STRICKEN PEOPLE'S CALL 161 

have given their lives in the cause for which we fought, and 
those who remained at home have responded with fine 
patriotism and devotion in every call. Yet today nearly 
one-half of the race lacks food and shelter without fault of 
its own. 

It seems to me most fitting that as Americans and Kan- 
sans we should hear the call from these stricken people and 
contribute of our means to a fund which will be devoted to 
their succor. 

Knowing the warm appreciation of justice which abides 
in the hearts of our people and the fine generosity with 
which they respond to every call from their less fortunate 
fellows, I, Arthur Capper, Governor of the State of Kan- 
sas, therefore, designate the period beginning January 12 
and ending January 18 as Jewish-Armenian relief days in 
this state. 

I call upon the people of all our cities, towns and rural 
communities to organize their forces and get behind this 
campaign with true Kansas spirit. No state has been more 
blessed with abundant crops than ours, and I am sure our 
people will be glad to give of their bountiful store for the 
relief of the people in the war ravaged countries, who are 
Mdthout food, without homes and even without opportunity 
in their present condition. I urge the newspapers of the 
state to give widest possible publicity to the campaign and 
appeal to the mayors and municipal officials to lend their 
whole-hearted support in making the undertaking a success. 
The Jewish campaign was postponed in December because 
of adverse circumstances. I hope the people will respond 
liberally to the appeal in January. 

In Testimony Whereof, I have hereurito subscribed my 
name and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State. 
Done at Topeka. the capitol, this 18th day of December, 
A. D., 1918. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



KANSAS' MATERIAL PROGRESS. 

From an Address at the Ceremonies Attending the Cancel- 
lation of the Last State Bond, Topeka, January 1, 1916. 

This ceremony of committing to the flames these scraps 
of paper representing an indebtedness of $159,000 marks 
the freedom of this state from outstanding bonds for the 
first time in the nearly 55 years of its existence. Kansas 
thus becomes one of the six states in the Union which have 
no bonded indebtedness. It is a good way in which to begin 
our fifty-sixth year. I can think of no better way of cele- 
brating this day. It means that our debts are all paid and 
that we are living within our income. And that is as wise 
as it is unusual in this era of mad extravagance. 

This event forcibly impresses upon us the substantial 
prosperity of our state. We are a fortunate commonwealth. 
Our per capita wealth of $1,630, is greater than that of any 
other state and twice as high as that of the United States 
as a whole. It gives us a total of nearly 3 billion dollars — 
$2,884,624,600 to be exact — of taxable wealth, an increase 
of 79 million dollars the past year — and enables us to main- 
tain a state tax rate of $1.25 on a thousand — lower than 
that of any other state with one exception. It is interesting 
to note that of the taxable property of Kansas, a little more 
than 15 per cent ($436,721,785), is owned by the various 
public utility companies. The 9,248 miles of railways in 
the state, with their equipment are assessed at $386,422,000 ; 
the property of the gas and pipe line companies at 20 mil- 
lion dollars and street and interurban railways at $13,- 
313,000. A total of more than 100 million dollars' worth of 
property owned by churches, lodges and public institutions 
is entirely exempt from taxation. 

The state itself owns property in its various public insti- 
tutions valued at 21i/> million dollars — more than double 

162 



MATERIAL PROGRESS 163 

the value of the state's property when these bonds were 
issned 12 years ago. No doubt we have not expended all the 
money for public institutions that many of us would like to 
see expended; but doubling our state property and the ex- 
penses of its administration in a decade can hardly be called 
a niggardly policy. Nearly 2 million dollars was distributed 
during the year thru our hospitals, asylums, orphanages 
and other public and private charities. 

Kansas municipal bonds are as salable and at as low rate 
of interest, as any municipal bonds in the nation. At least 
half of the municipal securities issued by Kansas cities and 
to^vns are owned in Kansas; 10 million dollars' worth of 
such bonds being held as an investment by the state school 
fund. If any of our Eastern friends in Wall Street or else- 
where own Kansas municipal bonds and want to get rid of 
them, I guarantee them a premium at any time. The brew- 
ery interests proclaim to the world that Kansas is on the 
high road to financial ruin, but at the same time they invest 
their surplus in Kansas municipal bonds. They buy them 
because they know sober Kansas pays its debts, and its 
bonds are worth more than 100 cents on the dollar. 

The prosperity of Kansas is shown in many ways. Our 
bank deposits of $224,110,576 are the largest per capita of 
any state — an increase of 23 million dollars in the year 
1915 ; our 74,162 automobiles — that's what it was Thursday 
and they've increased since — and will increase still more 
rapidly as we improve our roads — as .we will — gives one car 
to every sixth family- — a record equaled by only two other 
states; our 589 telephone companies with their 831 ex- 
changes and 340.000 telephones, gives a 'phone to every 
family of five — the largest percent«ige of any state ; our 
farm products in 1915 of $341,561,000 and our livestock 
valued at $310,655,000; our $325,000,000 of manufacturing 
products in 1915 — all give us reason for congratulation. 



OUR AFTER THE WAR PROGRAM. 
From an Address at Assaria, Kan., November 28, 1918. 

Here at home the first two years after peace are likely to 
test us almost as severely as the war itself. They will try 
our souls if we do not plan immediately for the time when 
those 2 or 3 million men come sailing home. 

Imagine a column of men, four in a row, marching by 
your house all day, day after day, for more than three 
months. That will give you some idea of the size of our 
army in France. 

When the peace treaty is signed, the government will be 
faced with the problems of returning and disbanding the 
men. Next it must find them employment. We have 
3,764,677 men under arms. The task of demobilizing this 
vast army and of returning the men to industrial, commer- 
cial and professional life will be as serious and more diffi- 
cult than getting them together. It is beset with graver 
economic and political dangers. We can all see that getting 
these men ready to do one thing is much simpler than find- 
ing 3 million jobs for 3 million men. The best brains of the 
nation will be needed for this great task. We must begin at 
once a big constructive program covering after-war needs. 

First of all, we must take care of the returning soldiers, 
so that they may not be compelled to suffer for the time 
they have spent, nor the loss or injury tliey have received 
in patriotic service. It must never be said that any de- 
fender of the flag came back to find himself handicapped 
by the service he rendered his country. 

Cannot Simply Disband Army. 

It will not be possible to demobilize the American na- 
tional army in a day. It would be terribly wrong to tJie 
men and decidedly unsafe to have the returning regiments 

164 



AFTER THE WAR 165 

brought back to the national cantonments and simply dis- 
banded. We must make plans for utilizing the services of 
these brave men. Many of them, by reason of their army 
experience, will be worth more to the nation. All will have 
their ideals somewhat changed. Many, after months in the 
open air, will resolve never again to work indoors. It is our 
duty to provide that not a single one of these splendid men 
shall become a wanderer, or a derelict, because there is noth- 
ing for him to do. The same draft boards which conscripted 
them can now render as invaluable a service by reversing 
the process and returning them to their employments. 
Every board has a record of each soldier and the job he 
left when he joined the army. Their duties now should be 
to bring these men and their former employers together once 
more so far as it is possible. The boards should now become 
employment agencies. 

Bring the Boys Home. 

Now the war is over we want our boys liere at home. 
There is no good reason why they should remain in Europe 
several years after the peace treaty is signed, with Germany 
disarmed and under the watchful eye of its neighbors. It is 
better for the boys and better for us that they come back 
and are returned to their work as promptly as this can be 
brought about. Europe now can safely be left, if it had not 
better be left, to put its house in order. It knows what it 
wants and how it wants it better than we do. Meanwhile 
America will render invaluable aid to this reconstruction by 
standing by these peoples with its food supply. Let's get 
the boys home as speedily as they can be demobilized and 
re-absorbed into civilian life. 

At the close of the Civil War when the armies of the 
North were disbanded, there was widespread concern lest 
political and economic disturbances would follow. It hap- 
pened that the nation of 50 years ago absorbed the soldiers 
quickly and without much difficulty. In large measure 
this absorption was made possible by the Homestead Act 



166 A LEAGUE OF P^REE NATIONS 

and by other legislation which opened vast tracts of public 
lands to settlers on easy terms. The result was the rapid 
development of a dozen new states that since have become 
the nation's greatest source of strength and means of pro- 
gress. Kansas was greatly helped. Thousands of men of 
this state who worked out our salvation during the "hard 
years" in Kansas before the state found itself agricultur- 
ally, were the hardy fighters who had crushed slavery. 
They were men who had learned to stand stalwartly at 
Gettysburg, or who had gone forward with Grant at 
Richmond. 

Need Co)i.structwe Program. 

Some of these men for a time, at least, will remain under 
arms. How many and for how long a time will depend 
upon the sort of peace that follows the Great War. We can 
hardly hope for the millennium ; but I am sure it is the firm 
determination of all America and, indeed, of the civilized 
world, that no ruler, no nation, must ever again be per- 
mitted to make war upon an unarmed, defenseless world. 
Civilization must never again be put in peril by a world 
war. We must have a league of free nations pledged to use 
their combined economic and military forces against any 
disturber of the world's peace, or we shall liave fought this 
war in vain. 

Experience demonstrates that nothing contributes more 
to the stability and well-being of the people than widely 
distributed land ownership and land occupancy. This 
makes it plain that one of the first steps to provide for the 
home-coming of our millions of young men in Europe must 
be a big constructive program for more farms. It is said 
there still are something like 400 million acres of unused 
farm lands left in the United States. Here then, is the one 
great opportunity for the returning American soldiers to 
find homes and become self-supporting, while at the same 
time adding to the wealth of the nation. 

Moreover, it is highly important that something be done 
without delay to alter and improve the relation of the popu- 



AFTER THE WAR 167 

latio]i of the land. By the time the war ends more than a 
million men will have been drawn from the farms. An 
equal number should be returned to agriculture — not as 
temporary farm hands, but on a permanent basis. The 
heretofore steady drift to the cities is unhealthy for all con- 
cerned, and it is not merely an American phenomenon : it is 
manifesting itself in nearly every part of the world. We 
know tlie causes and must remedy them. This problem of 
land and of country life is hitched up with the problem of 
dispersing- our great army. We can't pass it up. We've 
got to meet it. 

Means Great Leap Forward. 

In some sections irrigation promises much. In other 
parts of the country the land must be drained. In still 
other divisions stumpage must be removed by wholesale. 
The character of the soils, what they are best fitted for, the 
kind of citizens that will do best on these different lands, 
must be considered and provided for first of all. The fin- 
ancing of all these projects will be no small undertaking. 
Breaking up this amount of land — equal to a dozen good- 
sized states — is one of the biggest contracts any government 
ever has taken up under such pressing urgency of time and 
need. 

National resources must now be developed to the fullest 
extent. The men at the helm in Washington must see 
clearly. They must take in fully the whole situation. They 
must act broadly and with decision in no stinted manner. 
There must be no party favoritism, no plums to certain in- 
dividuals. In this politics and party support must be for- 
gotten. 

We are about to take a great leap forward and must 
gather ourselves for it. We must all unite to win the right 
conditions in peace time just as we have united to win the 
war, then this great national readjustment will be accom- 
plished without hardship and the nation will not feel the 
strain which otherwise will be heavy, possibly to the break- 
ing point. 



H>8 BETTER HIGHWAYS NECESSARY 

At the same time, we cannot longer overlook the practical 
questions now affecting the whole farming industry and 
urgently awaiting a satisfactory answer. 

Motor-ize Country Roads. 

Right along with honest markets, with the whole square- 
deal program, the eliminating of every unnecessary middle- 
man, the shutting out of every profiteer and parasite prey- 
ing on the farming industry, and the fostering of farmers' 
co-operative enterprises — the war has shown us that we 
must immediately cheapen and simplify the farm's access 
to market by means of good public roads. Cheap and quick 
motor transportation of products from and to the farm is 
coming. It is to be our next big development. It is already 
here in localities having good, all-year-round roads. It only 
needs right conditions to spring up anywhere. The war 
made this need manifest. It has taught us we must not 
depend so much on the railroads for short hauls. Also, it 
has taught us how to do big things in a big way. And now 
thru our necessity for finding employment for the millions 
of men when they come home, it is providing the way for 
us to kill the proverbial two birds Avith one stone.. It offers 
the way for employing thousands of our men who have seen, 
and have repaired and have rebuilt many of the magnifi- 
cent roads of France, in building good roads thruout our 
big agricultural states. Good roads have long been needed. 
Lack of labor and lack of strong state and national support 
have held them back. After the war there need be no fur- 
ther delay, for we shall have the labor — much of it skilled 
in rapid road construction at tlie front. Our men have seen 
the thousands of miles of good highways in the agricultural 
sections of France, Belgium, and* Germany. So a great 
road-building program must be put up near the head of 
the list. 

Prevent After -War Depression.. 

Closely connected with the opening up of new land and 
the building of roads, is the too long delayed action against 



AFTER THE WAR 169 

large land holdings. No longer must large tracts be held 
idle for speculative purposes. The owners of these millions 
of acres of idle lands must be forced to use them or to turn 
them over to someone who will. Drastic laws will be needed, 
but they must be wisely made and intelligently executed. 

Vast land grants still held by the railroads can be opened 
to settlement. Monopolies and combinations must be pre- 
vented from profiteering our natural resources. Oil land- 
holdings should be better regulated. A systematic plan for 
bringing oil properties into production consistent with 
public demand might be established. The natural resources 
of the country must be more thoroly developed under a 
scheme that will turn all profits above legitimate earnings 
back to the people. 

The general idea underlying the whole movement, must 
be to guard against having great numbers of unemployed 
men. This can only be done by providing for government 
undertakings in industrial and agricultural development. 
In this way we shall avoid widespread depression, hard 
times, and worse. 

Don't Invalid the Maimed. 

Liberal pensions to wounded and crippled men, in addi- 
tion to the insurance plan, will help preserve a healthy fin- 
ancial condition, aside from the fact that these pensions 
have been earned ; and we, on whom the taxes for the sup- 
port of such men will fall, should feel glad to pay in this 
way the debt we owe. Provision for the care of those who 
have given us so much must come first. The men not totally 
disabled must be helped to find suitable employment in 
order that the only door to happiness in life shall not be 
shut against them, for we have come to know that health of 
mind and body depend more than all else on steady occupa- 
tion. All we can do for the men who lay down their lives 
in this struggle is to give them a place of honor in our roll 
of fame ; but we can, and must, and will give the survivors 
a fair chance when they again enter civil life. It must never 



170 AMERICANIZING AMERICA 

bi; said that any defender of the flag came back to find him- 
self handicapped by the service he rendered his country. 

Make Immigration Selective. 

The war has brought clearly to view that our national 
unity is endangered, not only by illiteracy, but by diversity 
of language which results in lack of complete understand- 
ing and co-operation. No country can have a homogeneous 
or a safe basis for its public opinion and its institutions, 
unless these rest upon the foundation of a single language. 
To protect national unity and security, no American com- 
munity should hereafter be permitted to substitute any 
other language for good United States as the basis of com- 
mon school education, whether for conscious propaganda 
or otherwise. 

It is, therefore, very clear that we are interested as never 
before in solving the problem of immigration for the per- 
manent well-being of America. We have sometimes prided 
ourselves on the picture which America has offered of the 
Melting Pot of the world. But we must now see that the 
ingredients in this great melting pot are themselves clean 
and pure, since the quality of American citizenship and the 
future of our nation depend upon what we do with the vast 
number of immigrants that more and more in the last two 
or three decades have come from the oppressed and back- 
ward peoples of Southern and Eastern Europe. 

All Must Learn English. 

No time should be lost in making adequate provision for 
teaching our language to those adult immigrants who are 
beyond the reach of the elementary school, and yet have 
cast their lot with the people of the United States. A 
knowledge of our language, and evidence of some real 
understanding of the history and meaning of our institu- 
tions, should be required before the privilege of suffrage is 
conferred upon one who has grown up in another civiliza- 
tion than ours and under another flag and comes to live 
under the Stars and Stripes. Public safety is the supreme 



AFTER THE WAE 171 

law. Public safety requires that the safeguarding and the 
improvement of our institutions shall not be committed to 
those wlio have had no opportunity to gain knowledge of 
them or to gain sympathy with them. 

The War's Great Lesson. 

The quickened public intelligence and enlightened public 
conscience promoted by the war have given the world a 
fuller appreciation of man 's obligations to his fellow man — 
by all of us to all of us — the common weal. This happy 
understanding must be held. We must change our mental 
attitude toward the man of wealth if he uses his money and 
his greater opportunity to promote the good of society. 
Tlien we have the right use of wealth. The rewards of in- 
dustry must be more fairly distributed. A day's work hon- 
estly and faithfully performed, tho done with a pick and 
shovel, should earn the worker good food, decent clothing, 
a comfortable home, and an education for his children. The 
day is coming, if it is not already here, when this will be 
considered the absolute right of every man and woman. 

Beivare of Bolshevism. 

The present epidemic of Bolshevism in Europe carries a 
warning for us. Altho in America it does not seem a 
danger, we cannot afford to see this disease spread west- 
ward thru Europe to us. Bolshevism is the outgrowth of 
despair, the politics of hysteria. It signifies the morale of 
a nation has broken down. This political disease is certain 
to appear whenever conditions become so unbearable the 
people lose heart and run amuck in a blind effort to bring 
about a change in their condition or redress their wrongs. 
Bolshevist government is mob rule. It is government with- 
out steering wheel, or rudder. As a state of mind it is con- 
tagious, and it is not impossible for America to contract 
the disease. The best preventive is to remove contributive 
causes. 

The nations never have had such a lesson as this war has 
given them of the importance of wholesome living condi- 



172 WHOLESOME LIVING CONDITIONS 

tious for all the people. Army medical examiners in Eu- 
rope have found millions of physically unfit men. And we 
know that thousands were turned back by our examiners. 
It is known that England's neglect of the welfare of its 
people cost it not less than 1 million fighting men. As 
Lloyd George expresses it, "You cannot have an A-1 nation 
with Class 3 men." 

Results of Booze and Poverty. 

We now see, as we never have seen before, that the health 
and fitness of the people — and not the piling up of wealth 
and annexing of territory — are the real secret of a nation's 
power. Wholesome living conditions, not luxury, nor pov- 
erty, promote national efficiency. And it must begin at the 
cradle, if not before. The children now growing up who 
are to fill the gap due to the war in the generation to come, 
must first of all be properly nourished. Next, they must 
have wholesome environment, cheerful home life. It is bad 
environment and squalid living conditions that make crim- 
inals and degenerates. And this sums up the first, last and 
all the reasons for kicking booze out of this country and 
never letting this damnable curse come back. 

But booze is not by any means the only great enemy of 
national health and well-being. There is greedy profiteer- 
ing in the necessities of living. And there is hard work at 
low wages. Either of these evils results or tends toward 
half-fed and poorly clad bodies ; in shacks instead of homes ; 
in child labor instead of schools; in all work and no play; 
in no joy in life, no happiness — finally in breakdown. 

Greed Starving Out Homes. 

These enemies of the nation we always have with us. We 
have them in peace as well as in war time. Destructive, 
short-sighted, sordid, conscienceless greed for big profits 
and high dividends has led to an organized exploiting of 
the people of this country for a generation or more, and has 
done much to undermine the physical, mental and even 
moral health of the nation, for the undernourished man is 



AFTER THE WAR 173 

the easiest prey of the saloon, and undernourished mothers 
and undernourished babes die by thousands or eke out a 
miserable and diseased existence. Price-making in necessi- 
ties like wheat, meat and fuel, must never again be left to 
the gamblers of the exchanges or to corporate greed. 

The war profiteer has this and much more to answer for 
in return for his bloodstained dollars. Even with the high 
wages now paid in the big industrial centers, the increased 
pay in many instances has been found by the Federal De- 
partment of Labor insufficient to maintain families in rea- 
sonable comfort. "We must insure to every man and woman 
a comfortable home, a good return for their labor, and 
bro:.der opportunities. And the birthright of every child 
born in these United States must be health ; and tliis health 
must be guaranteed by the best physical and mental de- 
velopment. 

Stop Exploiting the People. 

The war has given us the means of enforcing economic 
justice in behalf of the people, and we must use it on the 
excess profit-takers. From now on there must be no com- 
promise with greed in our effort to attain the square deal 
which every citizen of these United States should have as 
his right. We must see the aggregation of enormous wealth 
in the hands of the few — what Ex-President Roosevelt de- 
scribed as ' ' swollen fortunes, ' ' — made impossible. We must 
see an end to the monopolistic control of lands, mines, for- 
ests, water-power and other natural resources, which ought 
to belong to all. It will never again be possible to record, 
as was done last year, that there are 296 men in America 
whose annual incomes are more than a million dollars each. 

We have two main methods of bringing about this condi- 
tion of justice, fair play and equality of opportunity. These 
are taxation and the rigid rooting out of monopolies. In 
our income taxes we have adopted the principle of graded 
rates, the larger incomes more highly taxed than the 
smaller. This graded principle applied in the taxation of 
land will effectually prevent vast landholdings, which 



174 DEMOCRACY AT HOME 

merely meau a dependent and eventually a peasant agricul- 
tural class. 

We should be the world's greatest commercial nation. 
We have more of the globe's resources in our keeping than 
any other people, and more huge industrial plants to trans- 
form these raw materials of soil and mine into manufac- 
tured products. Commerce from our great harbors should 
cover the seas. Our farms and factories should hum with 
industry from year's end to year's end, for our soil and our 
manufactured products excel. We have never had such a 
tremendous opportunity to benefit the world and ourselves 
as now is knocking at our door. But this beneficent supre- 
macy of peace times demands a constructive program which 
shall link up these great forces with argosies of merchant 
vessels, and with far-seeing, indefatigable, intelligent mer- 
chandising thru methods which will cater to the especial 
needs of the world's peoples. 

A large amount of the enthusiasm for all these things, 
amounting to the dawn of a new day, will be brought back 
by the returning men. Our men who have gone forth to 
battle for the republic against the Hun, will come home to 
fight, as Americans coming back from all of our wars have 
fought, against the enemies of American institutions at 
home. 

Rebirth of Democracy at Home. 

The men who saved this country from the German in- 
vader, will come home, as the men of the Revolution and of 
the Civil War did, to save this republic from those here, as 
in Russia, who would waste this rich legacy of the soldier's 
sacrifice. 

It is my guess the war will bring about a better under- 
standing between man and man the world over. Here in 
America I expect to see it stop our frequent and costly 
strikes, and be the means of putting the anarchist agitator 
out of a job because he will have nothing to rave over. This 
will come because "Over There" the son of the millionaire 
and the son of the carpenter were fighting and bleeding 



AFTER THE WAR 175 

side by side, first the oue and then the other risking his life 
to save his comrade, wounded in No Man's Land. Out of 
this struggle they are coming back with a new vision, a 
vision of the real man who has been found beneath the 
grime of labor and the polish of the college. And these 
comrades in arms today will be comrades in arms after the 
war is over; understanding one another as never before, 
they will strike hands together, work together, each for the 
other, and each for all, and a saner democracy will follow 
and the real brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of 
God will rule the nation. 

Courage and Wisdotn Needed. 

Practical men can be aided by a sympathetic state and 
national administration to put into effect these ideals that 
heretofore have only been hoped for. American initiative 
and American inventive genius and true American states- 
manship should be backed up a,s never before. 

It is a new birth that the nation will undergo ; it is a new 
America tliat we will create in the next decade. And woe 
betide us if, thru timid fear, thru incompetency, thru sel- 
fish partisanship, we fail to meet the issues in a way that 
befits America and her destiny. The American people are 
ready to make this vision real. How nearly we shall attain 
it depends upon the courage and the wisdom of the men to 
whom you now entrust the shaping of governmental policies. 



APPEAL TO CONGRESS FOR NATIONAL 
PROHIBITION. 

The Kansas delegation to the Anti-Saloon League conven- 
tion at Washington on December 13, 1917, presented to 
Congress the following appeal from Governor Capper for 



176 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

the immediate enactment of a bone-dry national prohibition 

measure : 

To the Congress of the United States : 

I wish to join the members of the Anti-Saloon League of 
America and other friends of prohibition in an earnest ap- 
peal for early and favorable action by Congress on the pro- 
posed amendment to the Constitution of the United States 
prohibiting the traffic in intoxicating liquors. I am 
prompted to this by a warm interest in the policy of prohi- 
bition and because of my knowledge of the far-reaching 
benefits obtained in Kansas by the closing of the saloons. 

Kansas Knows Value of Prohibition. 

We have had prohibition in Kansas for more than thirty- 
five years. To Kansas citizens prohibition is not an experi- 
ment ; it is a tried, established institution. Our people have 
had opportunity to observe the operation of prohibition 
closely and I am entirely conservative in saying that fully 
95 per cent of them consider the prohibitory law one of the 
greatest blessings ever bestowed upon the state by legisla- 
tion. They rejoice in the knowledge the saloon can never 
return to us, that Kansas is done with it forever. 

In approaching your honorable body on this subject I feel 
it appropriate to direct attention to a few instances wherein 
Kansas occupies a position of leadership. In the attainment 
of this leadership prohibition has had a large part. 

As a strictly business matter prohibition has paid big 
dividends in Kansas. Its strongest advocates in the state 
are the large employers of labor, the managers of the big 
railroad corporations, and the labor organizations. More 
than 4,000 men are employed in the Santa Fe railway shops 
in Topeka — the driest city of its size in the world. These 
shops maintain the highest efficiency of any shops in the 
Santa Fe system. The general manager of the Santa Fe 
railway says the books of the company show these shopmen 
turn out more work, consistently and promptly the year 
round, than the men of any other railroad shops. Seventy- 



AFTER THE WAR 177 

two per cent of the married men in these shops own their 
own homes — a showing not equaled by any other railway 
town in America. 

Business Booms Without Booze. 

Opponents of prohibition contend that prohibition hurts 
business and retards the development of a state. 

The livestock, orchard and agricultural crops of Kansas 
for 1916 amounted to more than 675 million dollars — an 
increase of more than 25 million dollars in one year. Of 
course, no one contends that prohibition is solely responsible 
for this showing of wealth, but this showing does present 
substantial evidence that prohibition does not hamper the 
progress of a people. 

Kansas is one of the very few states in the Union without 
indebtedness. 

On the basis of property assessed for taxation, Kansas 
has the greatest per capita wealth in the Union — $1,773 for 
every man, woman and child within the state. 

Kansas has 350 million dollars deposited in her banks- 
more than double the deposits of ten years ago. 

Kansas, under prohibition, is one of two states in the 
Union having the smallest number of persons who cannot 
read and write. It is significant that the other exceptional 
state also is a prohibition state. 

Kansas has 40 counties, out of a total of 105, which did 
not send a prisoner to the state penitentiary last year. 

Prison Rate Is Low. 

The prison rate for the entire country is 121 to the 
100,000 population. In Kansas it is 50 — one-half of one 
one-thousandth per cent. 

Thirty-two Kansas counties have abandoned their county 
poor farms. 

With one exception Kansas has the lowest death rate of 
any of the states within the registration area recognized by 



J7S KANSAS STATISTICS 

the federal government. Again the exception is a prohibi- 
tion state. 

An investigation by the chief of the medical staff of the 
Osawatomie State Hospital for the Insane, at Osawatomie. 
}^"an., shows the ratio of insanity having its origin in drunk- 
enness, is only 1.7 per cent in Kansas. The national aver- 
age is 10.1 per cent. 

I am glad to submit these facts to you in support of the 
contention that prohibition has been conducive to the spir- 
itual and material welfare of the people of Kansas. I hope 
you will find they merit your earnest consideration. 
Very respectfully, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



PATRIOTISM 

Thru Mr. Capper's Public Addresses there runs a strong 
note of patriotism and like most public men he has been 
called on frequently for speeches on purely patriotic occa- 
sions. In the following pages will be found excerpts from 
addresses made on such occasions and from some of his 
speeches on other occasions. 



179 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MEMORIAL DAY. 

From Memorial Day Speech at Clearwater, Kan., 1913. 

Today in a thousand cities, in a mjTiad of villages, in 
quiet country churchyards, old men and white haired 
women, leaning on the arms of manly sons — with their chil- 
dren and their children's children about them, move with 
one impulse to the Place of Graves, and on the green 
mounds that cover the poor shell of what was once a hero, 
lay the bloom of spring in token of honor and respect and 
gratitude ! 

There seems to me, my friends, a tender significance in 
the season chosen for the day of special honor to our soldier 
dead. It was a happy inspiration of General John A. Logan 
that IMemorial Day was so designated as to catch all the 
buds and blossoms of spring. Abraham Lincoln, ''less than 
God, but infinitely greater than man, ' ' died in the spring. 
The last expiring groans of the rebellion were heard in 
April. The nation had washed the stains from its body in a 
river of sacrificial blood that flowed from the hearts of its 
bravest and noblest youth, and stood forth before the world 
with clean hands and a bright face and commenced a new 
life with triumphal march, just as the blossoms of spring 
had thrown a pall of flowering glory on the graves of the 
patriotic dead. 

And so now, year by year, as our springs burst into 
radiant summer, we gather to honor the memory of those 
brave souls, living and dead, who in the spring-time of their 
eager young manhood gave their lives that this nation — one 
and undivided— might spring forth from chaos and disrup- 
tion into that state of liberty and freedom of which our 
forefathers dreamed. 

181 



182 CIVIL WAR PENSIONS 

They, indeed, gave birth, with travail and agony, to a new 
nation, and theirs be the radiant glory of our summer of 
happiness. 

And it was men in the spring-time of their youth who 
gave their lives and their all to the service of our country. 
The extreme youth of those who took part in our Civil War 
is to me one of the most interesting and one of the most 
pathetic features, of that gigantic struggle. 

Think of it : more than 100,000 of the contestants in the 
great struggle of '61 to '65 were under 15 years of age. 

More than 2 million were just 21 or under. Hardly out 
of school. Some of them barely out of knickerbockers. This 
seems to me to be one of the most astonishing facts in his- 
tory. This stupendous war, carried on for four years, com- 
prising some of the most stubbornly fought battles of all 
history, was virtually fought by boys, hundreds of thou- 
sands of whom should in the ordinary course of events, have 
received daily a father 's protection and a mother 's caresses. 
The tender age of so many engaged in this great strife fur- 
nishes convincing proof of what has so often been claimed 
that, after all, those who remained at home experienced the 
greatest measure of suffering. And who can measure the 
homesickness upon the field, and the grief and anxiety at 
home, all over the North and the South? It seems to me 
that these, after all, furnished the larger part of the tragedy 
of the Great War. 

The soldiers who preserved this nation did not count the 
cost. They gave, or were willing to give, something in- 
finitely more valuable than anj^ bounty a grateful nation 
has since been able to bestow in the shape of a so-called 
pension. But the pension is an expression of the gratitude 
of the nation ; inadequate, but not the less to be given on 
that account. The giving of the pension to the surviving 
soldiers or to the widow and the orphan, is one way by 
which the nation can say that it cannot be sufficiently 
grateful. The nation has given in pensions on account of 
the Civil War, nearly 3 billion dollars, an enormous sum, 



GRAND ARMY UNIQUE BODY 183 

but not beyond the pov/er of a rich and grateful nation 
easily and cheerfully to give. This vast sura, let us remem- 
ber, spread out over a whole generation, represents less than 
one-fiftieth part of the total wealth of the country at this 
moment ; a sum surely not too great to bestow, not as a mat- 
ter of charity, but of right, upon the preservers of the 
nation. A country that can burn up money for River and 
Harbor projects, Expositions, Panama canals, big battle- 
ships, and billion-dollar reclamation schemes is certainly 
rich enough to feed and care for her soldiers. 

These Grand Army men belong to an organization unique 
in many respects. There is one condition, and only one, as 
I understand it, which admits to membership : A member 
of the Grand Army of the Republic must have been honor- 
ably discharged from the army in which he enlisted for ser- 
vice in the Civil War. Made of cannon captured in battle, 
the little bronze button you comrades wear on the lapel of 
your coat, bears upon its face the words which have proved 
cornerstones to the most honorable social organization ever 
instituted among men. Wealth cannot buy membership in 
your organization, nor can influence, nor position, however 
exalted. More than 40,000 ex-soldiers of the Union are 
djdng every year, and the Grand Army of the Republic 
must grow ever smaller, because it cannot be recruited from 
a younger generation. 

We are here today to honor the soldiers who took part in 
our Great War without regard to their rank. 

We do honor the great generals of the war like Grant, 
Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, Logan and Meade, but on an 
occasion like this our thoughts are rather of the boys who 
went out from hundreds of thousands of homes, without 
regard to their rank in the service. 



KANSAS IS GRATEFUL TO CIVIL WAR VETERANS. 

From a Memorial Day Address at Hoyt, Kan., 

May 30, 1914. 

I rejoice that Kansas as a state has not been unmindful 
of her soldier citizens. No state in the Union, I think, has 
more fully recognized the debt of gratitude we owe them. 
In our state capital we have just completed a beautiful 
building of granite and marble which shall be a lasting 
memorial to their valor and patriotism. The state has by 
law made Memorial Day a sacred day; secular amusements 
such as circuses and baseball are absolutely prohibited on 
this day. Every school house in Kansas must fly tht 
American flag and must once a year observe this day of 
memorial. 

The state maintains a Soldiers' Home at Fort Dodge foi 
veterans and a Mother Bickerdyke Home for soldiers 
widows at Ellsworth. We give old soldiers preference r 
public employment, and have made pauperism among ou 
veterans impossible, each county of the state being con 
pelled to provide subsistence for its needy veterans at thei 
own homes, instead of in a public institution. And we se^ 
to it that the soldier, when his days are done, is laid to res' 
with due respect and honor, and in case his relatives ar« 
unable to provide fitting burial, the Kansas soldier is giver 
a patriotic funeral at the state's expense. 

Kansas honors itself in its attitude toward "the boys ii? 
blue." 

We may well be proud today of the fact that Kansas sent 
more men to swell the ranks of the Union army in propor- 
tion to population than any other state. The call to armsj 
was responded to by the people of Kansas with unparalleled 
unanimity and enthusiasm. Long before the President's 
official notification reached the governor, military com- 

181 



KANSAS STOOD FIRST 185 

panics had been organized in every town and- hamlet in the 
state and the first two regiments sworn into the service of 
the United States were not recruited — their companies were 
selected out of enough offered to form half a dozen regi- 
ments. You may not know that the official records of the 
war show that, reducing troops furnished to a 3-year stan- 
dard, only one state in the Union filled the quotas assigned 
it, and that state was Kansas. The general government 
called on Kansas, during the four years from '61 to '65 for 
12,931 men and we furnished nearly double the number 
called for — a total of 20,661, at a time when the whole num- 
ber of voters in the state as shown by the election of 1860 
was only 17,000 and its entire male population was a little 
less than 50,000. Furthermore, the official records also 
show that the proportion of Kansas soldiers killed in battle 
was larger than that of any other state. Massachusetts was 
third with 47 killed out of each thousand men, Vermont 
ranked second with 58 killed and Kansas had the highest 
battle mortality of all, 61 per thousand men. Such a record 
of devotion to a cause is, I believe, unexampled in the his- 
tory of any other war that ever has occurred in any age or 
country. 

And they have deposited in the new Memorial building 
at Topeka torn and tattered flags that all the wealth of 
Kansas could not buy. I know that Kansas will preserve 
among her priceless treasures, as long as her government 
shall endure, those ragged and faded flags — all that remain 
of the 18 Kansas regiments except a few thousand scattered 
survivors and the history with which they glorified the 
name of the state. 

We who came after to enjoy the fruits and reap the har- 
vests resultant from that great contest would be unworthy 
of the heritage left us if we did not strive diligently to ad- 
vance in all that promotes good government and good citi- 
zenship. 



FLAG ACCEPTANCE SPEECH. 

To the State Congress of the D. A. B. at Topeka, 
January 29, 1914. 

It is with much pleasure that I accept, on behalf of the 
state of Kansas, from the society of the Daughters of the 
American Revolution, the charge of transmitting to the 
keeping of the citizens of the City of Brotherly Love, this 
emblem of our country — the flag which we all revere. In 
Philadelphia on February 22nd, the anniversary of the 
birth of Washington, the President of the United States 
will raise this flag over Independence Hall — a token of the 
patriotism, the national feeling and the fraternal spirit of 
the West. 

Fifty-four years ago, Abraham Lincoln, standing in In- 
dependence Hall, the spot now marked by a bronze tablet, 
unfurled the first American flag bearing on its field of 
blue a star for the new state of Kansas. On Washington's 
birthday patriotic citizens of Philadelphia will celebrate 
that event with appropriate ceremony ; at the same moment, 
the people of Kansas will unfurl above our state house a 
flag sent us by citizens 'of Philadelphia, visualizing the 
great truth that we have no East, no North, no West, no 
South, but are one people, one nation and one flag. 

I am glad that this flag goes to the birthplace of our 
nation from a sober, God-fearing, law-respecting people; 
from a state that has within its borders no open saloon ; a 
state in which the people earnestly endeavor by law and 
custom to give to the poor man the same rights as to the 
rich man; a state in which womanhood is honored and re- 
spected, and where woman is in reality a citizen and is not 
classed in public affairs with criminals and the insane. 

It is peculiarly fitting that the women of Kansas should 
be the donors of this flag, especially the women whose fore- 

186 



A GIFT FROM KANSAS 187 

fatliers, inspired by devotiou to the cause of liberty, at Lex- 
iugton, at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga, at Brandywine, at 
Valley Forge, at Yorktown, by heroic, blood-stained sacri- 
fice made possible a new nation and gave significance to the 
emblem of red, white and blue stitched by the loving hands 
of Betsy Ross. 

The flag which you have put into my hands today will be 
transmitted to a committee of citizens of Philadelphia as a 
gift from the state of Kansas. It will wave above Inde- 
pendence Hall, where 139 years ago the immortal Declara- 
tion of Independence was signed, giving to the world a new 
' ' Cradle of Liberty. ' ' I pray that this emblem of our coun- 
try, as it floats over the beautiful city of Philadelphia, may 
instill in the hearts of all who see it, a greater love for this 
land of ours and its people, a greater devotion to freedom, 
justice and equality, and a more profound and deeper rev- 
erence for that righteousness which exalteth a nation. And 
may Kansas ever be true to all that flag represents; as a 
state may we ever stand for justice between man and man ; 
as a people may we ever maintain high ideals; as individ- 
uals may we remember that sobriety, morality and fairness 
are the crow^ning virtues of life; and may we each do our 
part .toward making Kansas greater in all things which 
make life worth while ; in making America a greater nation 
where there shall be more of sympathetic and co-operative 
effort ; and in hastening the progress of the race toward the 
Ultimate Goal of Man. 



KANSAS THE SOLDIER STATE. 

From, a Memorial Day Address at Wilson, Kan., 
May 29, 1915. 

I consider it as great an honor as can come to me, as great 
an honor as can be shown to any man, to be invited to come 
before the soldiers, the patriots, the heroes, who in time of 
need put aside their personal ambitions and gladly and 



188 WHAT KANSAS GAVE 

freely gave their young manhood and their lives to the 
country they loved. 

I speak to you as a native son of Kansas. Since my 
earliest recollection the stories of the sacrifices and services 
of the Civil War veterans of this state have been an inspir- 
ation to me, as they must be to every young man who has 
observed the growth and advancement of this matchless 
commonwealth. 

I hope we never shall forget in Kansas that this is the 
great soldier state of the Union, that Kansas really began 
the war six years before any other state had enlisted a regi- 
ment. When I remember that Kansas sent more men to 
swell the ranks of the Union army in proportion to popula- 
tion than any other state, I am proud that I am a Kansan, 
a native of this great soldier state. 

More than 50 years ago, to right a deep wrong and to 
maintain a God-given principle, this nation offered a great 
human sacrifice on the altar of Liberty, Humanity and 
Justice. And it was not offered in vain, for the memory of 
it, the glory of it, the sacredness of it has come down to us 
as a heritage and an obligation to this day and generation. 

We have met here today in memory of those great deeds 
of the '60s, to honor the brave men who performed- them 
and the brave women who so freely gave up all that is 
dearest in a woman's life that these men might offer up 
their lives in that great sacrifice. 

We mourn and honor those who fell, and we honor those 
who remain, who came through that fearful storm of death 
and have lived with us, their children and their children's 
children, to this day. They are heroes in our sight and in 
the world 's sight. It will never cease to revere them and to 
honor them long after we are gone and, it may be, forgotten. 

These "boys in blue" now are marching by. Every year 
from 12,000 to 15,000 in this country "obey the trumpet 
that shall never call retreat." Every month a regiment in 
the old army blue is mustered out. 

So before our eyes is passing the remnant of the Grand 



HEROES WORTHY OF HONOR 189 

Army and ere we know it we shall lose our personal touch, 
with the great events of the '60s and the men who took part 
in them. To many of us this passing of the Old Guard will 
mean the nearer, bitter personal loss of kindred. 

Nearly 3 million men were engaged in the heroic struggle 
for the preservation of the Union. 

The Civil War cost nearly a million lives. 

About half of these men either died on the field of battle 
or in hospitals and prisons that we might actually be a free 
people and have a * * star for every state and a state for every 
star," on a star-spangled banner, the most glorious banner 
the world has ever seen. 

And the Civil War gave us Lincoln; Lincoln- the com- 
passionate, the patient, the long-suffering — a great human 
soul touched with the gentleness and the divinity of Christ 
— a flesh and blood evidence in our day that what we know 
of the Son of Man does not rest on myth alone. I like to 
believe and I do believe that Lincoln typifies the strength, 
the patience, the serenity, the nobility, the mercy and the 
sane commonsense of the American people. 

This IMemorial Day, the day which links our hearts and 
actions to the past, brings sharply to our attention the obli- 
gation and the duty we owe to the present and the future. 
We are turning a mighty page in history to face a struggle 
no less momentous. The duty has come to us not only to 
insure human rights to all men at home, but to inspire and 
win respect for these rights abroad; not only to stand for 
the reign of law and order among men, but among nations. 

May we dedicate and consecrate ourselves to this duty 
inspired by that fading line of blue. 



A WAR FOR PROGRESS. 

From a Memorial Day Address, at Olathe, Kan., 
May 31, 1915. 

The Civil War as much as anything else was a fight 
against conservatism. It was a fight for progress, waged 



190 A WORLDWIDE INFLUENCE 

by the more progressive portion of the nation against the 
reactionary portion of the nation ; botli sides of course being 
sincere and each sure it was right. 

I am talking the language of Abraham Lincoln when I 
say that we must today in Kansas, as all over this great, 
growing country, have new measures to meet new issues. 

You men of the Grand Army of the Republic fought not 
only for the preservation of the Union, but you fought also 
for liberty and for equality of opportunity. That is the 
only kind of Union you would have fought for; the only 
kind it is worth while to fight for. The sacrifices you made, 
the suffering you and your dead comrades underwent, the 
drops of agony you shed, were all that this nation might 
indeed be the land of the free — where every man has equal 
privilege and equal rights. You have done your part; on 
the long, long march, in the tedious, homesick camp, on the 
shrieking field of battle, in the sickening hospital and in the 
loathsome prison — you have played well your part — and 
the nations of the earth have acclaimed you the greatest 
soldiers the world ever has seen. 

You made possible a free people. But that was not all 
that you did. That, in truth, was a small part of your ac- 
complishing. All that you did would have gone for naught 
—save for one thing — and that was the example you set for 
the men who came after you — we men and women of this 
generation. The inspiration of your life — and death — of 
your self-sacrifices, of your fidelity to duty, of your loy- 
alty — that is what counts and tliat is what makes your suf- 
fering worth while. 

I believe there are indications today in this country and 
this state of a revived love for the flag of our country, and 
I could wish that no American citizen would look upon it 
without saluting it. I hope that from this sacred spot, we 
shall go to our homes more resolutely set in our purpose as 
citizens of Kansas to conserve the peace and welfare of our 
state, to hold up the dignity and honor of our free institu- 
tions and to see that no harm shall come to our country, 



STILL MUCH TO DO 191 

whether from internal dissensions or from the aggressions 
of a foreign foe. 

The tide of immigration is still to the West. Let us en- 
courage it. But let us see that these immigrants come in 
well-ordered procession; that they come as friends and 
neighbors — to mingle their Wood with ours; to build their 
homes on our fields, to plant their Christian faith on these 
broad Kansas prairies, and not seeking to plant strange 
heresies of government and faith; but honoring our con- 
stitution and reverencing our God, to confirm and not 
estrange the simple faith in which we have been reared, and 
which we should transmit unsullied to future generations. 

I am not here today to speak in a spirit of pessimism or 
of fault-finding. Indeed, I am happy in the belief that the 
v/orld really grows better from age to age. 

There never was a time, it seems to me, in the history of 
this country when there was so much real interest in human 
welfare ; so much of the spirit of fair play ; so much real 
sympathy; so much high ideal, so much of the spirit of 
patriotism as there is today. 

But there is still so much to do ; great problems to solve 
in which you good men and women and especially the 
yoiirjger generation can and will have a big part; the curse 
of in':emperance must be utterly banished from America by 
coi;3plete nation-wide prohibition of the liquor traffic. I 
hoi)e and believe you and I shall live to see the day when 
the saloon will be outlawed from every state in the Union. 

The abominable social evil, white slavery and commer- 
cialized vice, must be eradicated; the indefensible double 
standard of morals must be wiped out absolutely; the 
exploitation of children in factories and mills must be 
stopped ; there must be less desecration of the Sabbath ; 
economic justice must be brought to the men and women 
who produce the wealth of the nation ; the opportunity for 
a practical education must be given to every child in the 
land. 

We must have a system that will make justice free in fact 



192 GREAT SOCIAL REFORMERS 

as well as in theory, to the poor as well as the rich; that 
will punish big thieves as well as little thieves, that will in- 
telligently and impartially enforce all our laws, and insure 
a larger measure of human welfare and social righteousness 
— these and a great many more problems which crowd upon 
us, insistently demand solution. 

We must not turn back or turn aside until we make 
America the land where honor rules the market, where a 
common man shall have in every respect a man 's chance ; 
until we make Kansas a commonwealth whose high ambi- 
tion is the common weal of mankind. 

Our effort today must be to bring into united and con- 
certed action all who are earnestly intent on combating the 
evils that curse the world, who would speed the progress of 
justice and peace and righteousness and brotherhood among 
men, and who would exalt and honor the King of kings as 
supreme among the nations as well as among men. 

I know that every good influence of this community will 
join the press in support of the present-day program which 
places humanity above the dollar, which inaugurates those 
vitally constructive measures, social, moral and economic, 
lifting the common life to a higher level, which demands 
for every individual, no matter what his condition, color, or 
creed, the right to an equal opportunity, a fair field and no 
favors. It's a program that means much for the cause of 
justice, for the helpless and the wronged, the betterment of 
mankind, for the promulgation of righteous laws and the 
triumph of higher civic ideals, for honest and decent admin- 
istration of public affairs — a program, my friends, which is 
worthy the consecrated effort of every Christian. citizen of 
Kansas. 

We may differ as to theories and methods, but we mast 
be agreed in the one idea that America must reach her per- 
fect grandeur through the patriotism of her people — a 
patriotism not necessarily the result of conflict, but of pa- 



CIVIC IDEALS 19a 

tience and self-sacrifice, of earnest endeavor; of conscien- 
tious effort; of honesty of purpose. 

May I not therefore ask you to carry the patriotic senti- 
ments and emotions of today into ,your homes, into your 
schools, where children are gathered and teach them that 
the eye of the young and the old should look upon that flag 
as one of the familiar glories of every Kansan. 



THE KANSAS TYPE OF PATRIOTISM. 

From an Address at the Wichita (Kan.) M. E. Church, 
Patriotic Day, July 4, 1915. 

It is in no spirit of self-righteousness that 1 have spoken 
to you of the high standards and high ideals of our state. 
I realize, and I think every thiuking Kansan realizes, that 
there is much yet to be accomplished. Kansas has many 
problems yet to solve, America has questions big with im- 
port pressing for solution. The whole world must take a 
long step forward before we reach the ideal state of a uni- 
versal brotherhood of man. We in Kansas, as well as our 
friends across the seas, must approach these problems with 
true humilit}^ of spirit. We cannot credit ourselves with 
all the virtue of the world. We, in Kansas, in common with 
the rest of humanity, need a broader patriotism, a patriot- 
ism that wdll embrace not only our Qwn community, not 
only our own state, not only our own nation, but that wall 
include th.e children of God wherever they are found. 

We need a patriotism that will lead us to make personal 
sacrifices in our daily lives for the common good ; we need 
a patriotism that will enable us to look at all public ques- 
tions in a spirit of fairness and justice to our fellow men; 
we need a patriotism that will enable us to see the other 
side of controversies and to feel a deep sympathy with the 
other man's viewpoint; we need, most of all, an individual 
patriotism which will make us see that no real progress for 
our country can be gained at the expense of any class or any 



194 A DEEPER PATRIOTISM 

section. Humanity must rise together. A position attained 
in private life or in public life by the individual at the ex- 
pense of others is a position of dishonor rather than honor ; 
a place gained by a state or nation through injustice rests 
on a foundation which cannot stand. We all need to learn 
this lesson. 

This question of patriotic citizenship is not merely a 
theme for Fourth of July orations and sermons. It is in- 
tensely practical. It comes home to every one of us. You 
each have an individual interest — a selfish interest, if you 
please — in maintaining the highest possible grade of citi- 
zenship in your community, in your county, in your state 
and in your nation. It concerns you and your personal 
welfare. It pays to maintain good citizenship. It pays to 
be a good citizen. I think we m ly well congratulate our- 
selves on this memorable anniversary that the spirit of a 
broader, deeper patriotism— the patriotism that takes into 
account the well-being and the rights of the humblest citi- 
zen — is growing all over this country. 

In every walk of American life, from the humble day 
laborer to the haughty millionaire, I think we still maintain 
that high quality of courage and sacrifice and patriotism 
which has distinguished our race throughout the ages. 

When the Lusitanja was sinking Alfred Vanderbilt gave 
the lifebelt which might have saved his life, to a Avomm he 
never had seen before. Then he proceeded to assist other 
Avomen and children to the boats. When the Titanic sank, 
Colonel John Jacob Astor placed his young wife in a life- 
boat. Then in a seat beside her, which he might have taken, 
he placed another woman, c dmly accepting death by drown- 
ing for himself. As a people we seldom have a good word 
for our men of millions, but none of us may question the 
manliood nor the high courage of these two who had youth, 
woallh and everything else to live for; who had never 
known what it was to deprive themselves of anything, and 



THE SOUL OF THE FATHERS 195 

smrdy sense and thrift of the Dutch on Manhattan Ishmd ; 
the love of liberty of the Hugenots; the spirit of adventure 
and high enterprise of the Cavaliers ; and the soul of all our 
fathers who braved the perils of the seas and the dangers 
and trials of an unknown wilderness to found a new nation 

in a new world. 

That is what "Old Glory" means to you: the blood and 
spirit, the life and soul of all the patriots who made possible 
a land of the free. 



JOHN BROWN THE IMMORTAL. 

At the John Broivn Celebration, Osaivatomie, Kan., 
August 30, 1916. 

We gather here today to take from the hands of gentle, 
tenuer-hearted women a tablet of bronze which shall be an 
enduring memorial to a man who died in blood and strife. 

The constituted authorities under the law of the land 
hung John Brown by the neck until dead, as an outlaw, a 
traitor, a murderer. 

His closest friends, his most ardent sympathizers re- 
garded him as a fanatic, a mad man. 

A half century ago millions looked upon him as the em- 
bodiment of all that is diabolical and destructive in human 
society. His name was a by-word and a hissing to a large 
portion of the American people. And yet in this time of a 
world crisis, when we are depressed by the horror of world- 
wide war, and impressed as never before hy the hopeless 
futility of force in the solution of the problems of the race 
— we gather here in loving memory of a man who set at 
nauglit the laws of his land and sought by petty insurrec- 
tion and riot to destroy a world-old institution, firmly en- 
grafted upon society and deeply entrenched in law. 

Wliy do we, law-abiding and law-respecting American 
citizens — we who would have all things done in decency and 



196 DEEDS OF SELF SACRIFICE 

yet who coiild renounce life itself simply to be American 
gentlemen. 

When the flood swept over Topeka, Edward Grafstrom, 
Santa Fe engineer, hastily built a raft, and in the face of 
almost certain death, rescued more than a score of men and 
women before going down to death in the turbulent waters 
from which he had saved them at the sacrifice of his life. 
When a child fell into a well filled with deadly gases, 
Henry Robinson, a plain, every day citizen of Pierceville, 
Kan., without a moment's hesitation, lowered himself into 
the poisonous fumes and saved — at the risk of his o^vn — a 
precious human life. Kansas history, from the first day 
down to the present, is filled with deeds of heroism and 
self-sacrifice. In the field, on the street, in the railway 
yard, we find every day men and women who are ready to 
lay down their lives in the service of humanity. It is not 
necessary to go to the bloody battlefields of Europe to find 
heroes, nor to the camps and hospitals of that sore beset 
continent to find true heroines. I know that we have them 
here in Kansas — men and women of heroic strain, who in 
living their daily life, in doing their part in the world's 
work, in maintaining the high standards which are our 
ideal, are showing as great heroism and patriotism as was 
ever shown in storm or battle. 

In my opinion one great evidence that education and 
home-training is not a failure in Kansas, is that in Kansas 
patriotism — true patriotism — is a household virtue. Our 
Kansas boys and girls are Americans, every inch of them. 
And I believe it will not be difficult to inspire in them as 
men and women, the desire to make an intensely practical 
and effective use of this patriotic feeling; to turn their 
patriotism into patriotic action, and so, live it. What a 
great thing for Kansas and the nation! 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FLAG. 

From Flag Day Speech, Memorial Hall, Topeka, Kan., 
June 14, 1916. 

What does this flag — our own "Old Glory" — mean to 
you and to me? 

It is only a piece of bunting with its stripes of red and 
white and its field of blue strewn with stars. In and of 
itself it would mean nothing to a stranger who had never 
before seen it. Why, then, does every true American feel 
thruout his whole being a thrill when he sees it flapping in 
the breeze or borne at the head of a column of marching 
men? We think it the most beautiful flag in the world; 
we love its mingled colors; but we know that its appeal is 
not to our artistic sense alone ; it is not its beauty that moves 
and inspires us. Deeper than its wondrous blue; brighter 
than its brilliant red; higher than its shining stars is its 
significance. For it symbolizes as does no other national 
insignia, the foundation upon which Civilization and Re- 
ligion itself must rest: the inherent right of a people to 
self-government and freedom of conscience. 

That is what "Old Glory" means to you: Freedom from 
the tyranny of king and czar ; freedom from the tyranny of 
class and caste or sect ; freedom to grow, to expand, to de- 
velop; freedom to work out your own salvation; freedom 
for your posterity — for your sons and their sons and daugh- 
ters after them. 

The flag is to us the visible emblem of all that lovers of 
liberty in all lands and in all times, have suffered and 
fought and died for. It represents the ideals for which the 
martyrs ' ' whose blood was the seed of the church ' ' went to 
the stake and gibbet. Betsy Ross sewed into its fabric the 
aspirations and the grim determination of the Pilgrim 
Fathers; the charity and benevolence of the Quakers; the 

197 



198 ONE OF FKEEDOM'S MARTYRS 

in order — revere as a hero the gaunt old Yankee outlaw of 
Osawatomie ? 

Why have these patriotic women who are so firmly op- 
posed to all forms of lawlessness, who teach their children 
respect for authority, who shrink with horror from the 
shedding of blood — Avhy have they with loving hands 
erected this memorial to one who rode rough-shod over so 
many of the principles they hold so dear? 

Why has the name of John Brown a place so high in the 
roll of American heroes? 

The answer is not difficult. There is no inconsistency 
between our respect for law and order and our reverence 
for the memory of that willing martyr in the cause of 
Freedom. John Brown, madman tho he may have been, 
possessed by one idea — obsessed by it perhaps — neverthe- 
less heard within him the mandate of a law higher than the 
law made by man, and touched by the divine fire that burns 
in the soul of the prophets and the martyrs, went without 
flinching to the task set him by his conscience. 

Human slavery was repugnant to every riglit-tliinking 
man and abhorrent to God. Away with it, then ! "Why 
waste time in academic discussions or in milk-and-water 
parleyings? The way to free the slaves was to free them! 
A nation was arguing and discussing and splitting hairs 
while an enslaved people was dragging its shackled limbs to 
unremitting toil. It was time for action, for deeds — not 
words; and while a hesitating people waited and self-seek- 
ing public men procrastinated, the valiant John Brown, a 
man who never knew what physical fear meant, started the 
conflagration that purged this nation and the world of the 
vilest blot of modern civilization. His authority, as one of 
his followers told an inquirer at Harper's Ferry, was God 
Almightj'; like Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, he acted "in 
the name of the Great Jehovah" ; his commission came from 
his conscieuee, and if the God of Hosts sent him no rein- 
forcemorits it w;is not John Brown's fault. 

The time was not ripe. But John Brown's devotion to 



A PRICELESS HERITAGE 199 

his ideal of liberty and freedom ; the blow he struck in be- 
half of a more rigliteous civilization, was not wasted. His 
mad expedition was not a failure. He did not die in vain. 
The calm dignity witli which he met his doom, worthy of a 
Socrates with his hemlock, roused a lethargic North and 
cemented a fiery South as nothing else could have done. 
His execution, hailed in the South as a righteous vengeance 
of outraged law and in the North as a glorious martyrdom, 
forced the issue and hastened the inevitable contest that 
remade this nation of free people. 

We are slowly, all too slowly, forgetting the rancor and 
bitterness of those mad days of fifty and sixty years ago. 
We may well let the dead past bury its dead. But we have 
a priceless heritage in the memory of those valiant souls 
who with devotion to their country and with love for hu- 
manity, dared all, gave all for an ideal. And in that list of 
heroes no name shines with greater lustre than that of John 
Brown of Osawatomie. This tablet which we put in place 
today is merely a record of our appreciation of his valor 
and righteous zeal. The memory of John Brown needs no 
brass nor bronze to perpetuate it. His is indeed 
'' — one of the few, immortal names 
That were not born to die." 

His soul goes marching on. 



EFFICIENT PUBLIC SERVICE. 

From an Address to the Chase County Repxiblican Con- 
vention, Cottonwood Falls, March 11, 1916. 

Quietly, without fuss, or feathers, or fireworks — just as 
I do in my own business — I have endeavored to give the 
people of Kansas a clean, an honest, an open, a straight- 
forward, a self-respecting and a business-like administra- 
tion. I am watching the state institutions closely, cutting 
out waste and graft, selecting only competent, high-grade 



200 EFFICIENT PUBLIC SERVICE 

meu for public service ; and I am succeeding wherever my 
work is not blocked by laws purposely passed to intrench 
the spoils system. 

Within a year I have visited and inspected from top to 
bottom every one of the state's 18 educational, charitable 
and reformatory institutions. I have inspected all of them 
once and some of them twice, and I have suggested and 
made changes at every one. 

By better system and by giving the men steady employ- 
ment during working hours, we have doubled the output 
of coal at the penitentiary mine and greatly increased the 
product of its other industries. At the same time, I have 
put over these prisoners the kindest and most humane war- 
den they have ever had and the most efficient. These men 
are never so unhappy as when they have no purposeful work 
to do and no incentive for which to work. The physical, 
moral, and mental condition of the penitentiary is immeas- 
urably better under Warden Codding and improvement is 
steadily going forward. All slipshod methods are being 
weeded out and this institution has been reclaimed from 
the badly demoralized condition in which we found it. 

The highly ornamental and eleemosynary office of hotel 
inspector has been abolished. It provided a soft place for 
nearly a half-dozen seat-warming individuals and was doing 
nobody any real service. 

I found it was not an uncommon thing for a number of 
inspectors from other state departments to be in the same 
town at the same time. On one occasion nine of them ap- 
peared in one little town on the same day. Now one man 
is sent and he makes a more thoro inspection than the nine 
did formerly. An immense saving in traveling expenses 
and salaries has been the result. 

We have cut off the irrigation board graft, which simply 
provided high salaries for three men and gave them no op- 
portunity to earn even a small part of it. 

At the State Orphans' Home I found one paid employe 
on tl e payroll for every four children and a superintendent 



CUTTING OUT WASTES 201 

conceded to be unfitted for the duties of the office. All 
this has been changed and a superintendent of experience, 
one having a great natural love for children, is in charge. 

1 obtained for a state accountant a man who has devel- 
oped a bookkeeping system for counties that is used in 
many states. He is instituting a uniform system of ac- 
counting for all the state departments and institutions, 
whereby they may readily be checked up and their condi- 
tion and the quality of their management be made clearly 
apparent day by day, just as in a scientifically conducted 
business. Wlien I turned the office of state accountant 
over to Mr. Caton, I said to him : "Your job is not political. 
What we want is results. ' ' And we are getting the results. 
This important work is steadily going forward. 

We found we had a superintendent at the Hutchinson 
Reformatory who was exceptionally efficient. And he is a 
Democrat. I did just what you would do or I would do in 
my own business. I kept him. The state of Kansas cannot 
afford to lose such an official just because he was raised a 
Democrat, and is not going to so long as I am governor. I 
am retaining all the first-class men that I find in the public 
service regardless of politics when their records show they 
are entitled to it, by being unusually competent, and faith- 
ful. A governor who does otherwise violates his oath of 
office and his promise to the people. This is the only way 
Ave shall ever get 100 cents worth of service for every dollar 
we spend. This must be the first purpose in building up 
and maintaining a public service that will deliver the goods. 
And this must be the policy if our tax money is ever to be 
well spent. Furthermore, I say to you that this is good 
politics for the Republican party or for any other party. 
The acid test is the party's service to the people. And ser- 
vice is one of the great fundamental principles of Repub- 
licanism. The Republican party has always been quick to 
rise above party whenever it was to the interest of state or 
nation to do so. Of this its whole history is eloquent. 

I have given every state employe to understand by many 



202 EFFICIENT PUBLIC SERVICE 

examples, by letter and by word of mouth that no incompe- 
tent or useless person can hold a job under this administra- 
tion simply because he "votes right." He must do his 
work earnestly, industriously and well to be kept. Simply 
because he "votes the ticket" is no longer a reason for 
keeping anyone on the state's payroll. 

There were 60 men who wanted the job of fish and game 
warden. Many of them were good men but without experi- 
ence. I selected a man who had had 21 years' experience in 
such work for the government and the state, and he is con- 
ducting, in the way it should be conducted, a much more 
important part of the state's business than the spoilsmen 
have ever let the people of Kansas realize there was in 
that job. 

I might go on at length. This is a subject I always ap- 
proach with enthusiasm because my heart is in it, but it 
would take too long to tell it all or to go into detail. 

In bringing about and in doing these things, I believe I 
am standing for the practical ideals Kansas Republicanism 
believes in and you believe in. The great central, driving 
purpose behind it all is the purpose to promote and encour- 
age the development of our state agriculturally, industrially 
and educationally— a big, broad, liberal policy in keeping 
with a great state and looking for every practical avenue 
for advancement, including a system of good roads that will 
be good roads, and a system of state government that will 
be systematic, working like clockwork with the least noise 
and the least expense and giving everybody genuine, steady 
and faithful service all the time with the least waste of 
time, means or labor. That is a glorious ambition worthy 
of us as Kansans, as citizens and as party men. 



INAUGURAL ADDRESSES 

AND 
LEGISLATIVE MESSAGES 



FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

Delivered in Representative Hall, the State Capitol, 
Topeka, Kan., January 11, 1915. 

Fellow Citizens : In compliance with the will of the sov- 
ereign people of Kansas; in accordance with the constitu- 
tion of the state, I have appeared here today to take the 
oath of office as your chief state executive, and with deep 
and solemn realization of the responsibilities imposed, to 
pledge and promise you before God, the Almighty Ruler, to 
consecrate to the people of my native state all my energies 
and my utmost ability. God help me to be faithful to the 
trust given me this day. 

To my associates in every department of the state admin- 
istration, I offer congratulations upon the opportunity we 
together have to serve the people of Kansas ; I promise them 
my whole-hearted co-operation in their work. To my prede- 
cessor in the office of governor, who has given this state his 
best service for the last tw^o years, I join with all Kansas in 
wishing happiness and success in whatever he undertakes. 

No Pet Measures. 

My friends, I am to be your executive for the next two 
years — the first governor chosen by the suffrage of both 
the men and the women of the state. I shall earnestly en- 
deavor to be the faithful and conscientious steward of the 
state which has honored me ; to be in every official act just 
and fair ; to avoid favoritism and partisanship, and to serve 
faithfully the whole state. I have no pet schemes nor fads 
to introduce ; no political panacea to propose ; no revolu- 
tionary methods to try. I shall simply endeavor to do my 
duty thoroughly and to administer the affairs of the state 
in a business-like manner. I shall have need of your pa- 

205 



206 FIRST INAUGURAL 

tieiiee and forbearance. Above all, I ask the broadminded, 
patriotic men and women of Kansas of all political parties, 
to co-operate with me in working out the many problems 
with which onr state government is concerned. Your re- 
sponsibility for good government does not cease when you 
cast your ballot; no governor alone can accomplish what 
you in your hearts want done for Kansas. He must have 
back of him the sympathetic support and the hearty, active 
co-operation of all good people. We are realizing in Kansas 
that tliere is much to do. I invite all who would' speed the 
progress of good government, of decency and justice, and 
peace and brotherhood among men, to join hands with me 
in combating the social and political evils and the economic 
wrongs from which avc suffer. 

Looking For Better Ways. 

"We live in a day of readjustments. This second decade 
of the Twentieth Century is a time of unrest, of change. 
Mankind is examining the old ways and is asking with a 
new insistence if there be better ways. Science and inven- 
tion, by a series of marvelous and bewildering discoveries, 
in a single generation, have completely revolutionized our 
material life and the business methods of the civilized world. 
New utilities have changed our methods of work and our 
manner of living. And along with these wonderful inven- 
tions, has come an enlarged, and, T think, wholesome view 
of the function of government, which brings with it the im- 
perative necessity of a revision and rearrangement of much 
of our governmental systems. The methods of administra- 
tion of our great railway systems and our big industrial cor- 
porations have changed mightily in the last quarter century. 
Even the small tradesman with his deepened appreciation 
of system has radically changed his business methods in a 
decade. But in the business of government — local, state 
and national — we have been slow to adopt the scientific 
methods which are working out so satisfactorily in private 
business. Until quite recently the term efficiency in this 



REDUCE BURDENSOME TAXES 207 

specialized significance has hardly been thought of in con- 
nection with public affairs. Petty graft, favoritism, ap- 
pointments made solely for partisan effect and all the waste 
and corruption of the abominable spoils system have, too 
often, been taken as a matter of course. 

As an inevitable consequence the burdens of taxation have- 
increased at an alarming rate without commensurate bene- 
fit to tlie public. In Kansas the total expense of govern- 
ment, state and local, in 10 years has risen from 16 million 
doUirs annually to 30 million dollars, far out of proportion 
to growth in population. We cannot charge that this in- 
crease has been 6ntirely uncalled for; much of the money 
has been wisely expended in building up institutions which 
are a credit to Kansas; but under our antiquated, inco- 
ordinate, cumbersome system nnsuited to modern business 
conditions, we invite graft and encourage carelessness, and 
in the end have a government that is wasteful, expensive, 
and inadecjuate to our growing needs. 

3Iust Have Business Methods. 

The day has come when we people of Kansas must give 
most serious attention to the urgent necessity of many 
changes in the business methods of our state and county 
and municipal government. I do not believe that the state 
government should be made the experimental ground for 
fads ; for sudden, sweeping changes, nor for wild or revolu- 
tionary departures from known or worked-out methods ; we 
cannot afford to try out dreams at the people's expense. 
But neither can we afford to wrap ourselves in the comfort- 
able, easy mantle of precedent and close our eyes to the ad- 
vantages arising from the adopting of modern methods of 
conducting business, from more economical means, from 
shorter cuts, from increased efficiency and from a greater 
concentration of responsibility. 

Kansas must adopt, in the administration of public af- 
fairs, a modern, scientific, business system which will elim- 
inate what is useless and provide for more direct, more eco- 



208 FIRST INAUGURAL 

nomical and more efficient methods. It is not enough to 
elect honest men, or well-meaning men, or capable men to 
positions of .trust and responsibility if we tie their hands 
with useless red tape and enforce upon them cumbersome, 
expensive and wasteful methods. ]\Iy predecessors in office 
.have had to meet this very real difficulty, as I shall, and I 
honor them for what they have accomplished in spite of 
these obstacles. . 

Requires Scientific Study. 

This needed reorganization is not the work of a day nor 
of one administration. It will require constant study of the 
most searching, scientific nature, and statesmanship of the 
most practical order, prompted and backed by an honest 
determination to give the people of Kansas the most effi- 
cient system of government that can be devised for them. 
Other states of the Union are grappling with this big prob- 
lem and are studying, investigating and testing. Kansas 
must step into line and begin at once a careful investigation 
of a more scientific business system which will promote 
efficiency and economy — from the state house down to the 
toT\Tiship trustee. This I consider one of the most pressing 
problems of our immediate future, and I am strong in the 
liope that advanced steps toward its solution will be taken 
during this administration. 

Kansas is still a young state, but we believe it to be a 
state destined under the providence of the Almighty to 
great things. It behooves us who have been so blessed to 
keep ever in mind, now while we are still in the formative 
period of our material and social development, the future 
of the state and its people. We must build wisely that we 
may hand down to posterity a commonwealth noble in 
structure and form, suited as well as we can foresee to the 
needs of a coming generation. Timidity, indifference, nig- 
gardliness are not in keeping with the Kansas spirit. From 
the dark and trying days of the state's first settlement, the 



FOR BETTER RURAL SCHOOLS 209 

Kansas people have shown a willingness to dare, to sacri- 
fice, even to die for the common good. 

And we have many tasks before us; material tasks which 
need money for their accomplishment. The standard of our 
rural schools must be raised and our state educational insti- 
tutions be kept on a par with the best of any state in the 
Union. We must improve, as rapidly as possible, our public 
roads and highways. The state's latent resources must be 
developed , some of them perhaps at public expense. Sev- 
eral of our penal and charitable institutions demand imme- 
diate improvement and increased facilities. 



Need to Watch ExpendHu^ s. 

We cannot ignore all tiiese insistent deman^^. Kansas 
could use profitably ten times the amount of money that 
our tax levy provides. But there is a time for all things, 
and I do not believe that the peoi)le of Kansas are in a mood 
to sanction large expenditures at this time or heavy invest- 
ments for the future, while the world is going through one 
of the greatest crises in its history. Business has been de 
moralized to an extent that we in prosperous, sun-warmed, 
Gfld-favored Kansas do not realize. We, in Kansas, have 
felt only the outermost effects of the terrible disaster which 
is convulsing civilization; we do not appreciate the suffer- 
ing, the want and woe which have settled like a pall upon 
the greater part of the human race. 

I am not pessimistic ; I do not think America is to have a 
protracted period of business depression, but I believe this 
is the year of all years to use the pruning knife on appro- 
priations; to eliminate every useless public position; to see 
to it that men who are elected or appointed to perform cer- 
tain duties, perform them themselves instead of delegating 
them to assistants; to adopt a policy of rigid economy in 
public affairs, just as the business man does, just as the 



210 FIRST INAUGURAL 

housewife does, just as the farmer does wheu cireumstauces 
compel him to economize. 

Make Simple and Just Laws. 

In this necessary policy of economy, I hope we may see 
the desirability of restraint in creating needless legislation; 
We make too many laws. Our need is not more laws, but 
laws made so plain, so simple, so direct and so just, that the 
humblest citizen can know them and understand them and 
respect them and obey them. There are in Kansas, as else- 
where, evils to correct, abuses to reform, new conditions to 
meet. Theoretically, our representatives meet in biennial 
session to consider what changes are necessary to our state 
statutes, that our people may deal justly with one another ; 
to make the rule of public conduct and private transaction 
clearer and plainer; to correct injustice between man and 
man; to protect the public health and morals — these osten- 
sibly are the objects of the deliberations of our legislative 
bodies. A certain amount of legislation is necessary, but in. 
practice how often do we find a personal motive or a private 
interest prompting the introducing of a bill ; how often do 
we find members voting with small regard to the intent or 
effect of a measure; with the result that hastily-drawn, 
illy-considered, illy-advised measures are enacted into laws, 
cumber our statute books, breed litigation, and work hard- 
ships to a patient and long-suffering people. I hope the 
Kansas legislature of 1915 will give most careful consider- 
ation to the need, the intent and the form of every measure 
which comes before it, that our people may have construc- 
tive legislation and be spared a flood of unnecessary and 
confusing laws. Let our effort be toward speedier and 
cheaper administration of justice; the utmost simplicity of 
form and language; straightforAvardness of intent and even- 
handed justice for every citizen of Kansas, no matter what 
his condition, color or creed. 

Kansas has been greatly blessed in material things. But 
these are not our greatest glory. The pioneers who trans- 



STANDARDS ARE HIGH 211 

formed this wilderness for us were hardy meu aud women, 
strong of heart and great of soul. They laid the foundation 
for a great state. It was Kansas that led the way in the 
great struggle for human freedom in the '60s and the Kan- 
sas conscience, during the last quarter of a century, has 
done much in the nation to elevate the moral and commer- 
cial standards of the people. 

Kansas Has Constructive Laws. 

Kansas has a shining record of accomplishment in the 
field of successful, constructive legislation. Its prohibitory 
law, equal suffrage law, its "blue sky" law, its bank guar- 
anty law, its primary election law, its anti-pass law, its 
pure-food law and its state text-book law, show the pro- 
gressive, forward-looking spirit of the Kansas people. 

There has been a genuine effort in Kansas to incorporate 
into our body politic, fundamental, moral ideas; we have 
tried to base our laws upon eternal truths which tend to 
righteousness. Kansas comes nearer giving every man, 
woman and child within its borders an absolutely square 
deal and equal chance in every department of life than any 
other commonwealth in this Union. And this has been true 
because our Kansas citizenship, is made up of men and 
women dominated by Christian ideals of right living, high 
thinking, decency, honesty, sobriety, industry and the 
noblest things of life. Our material prosperity, our high 
standards of public morals, our personal well-being are 
largely due to the fact that for more than 30 years the open 
saloon has been an outlaw in this state. Our physical de- 
velopment has not been stunted, and our moral sense has 
not been blunted by the degenerating influences of drink. 
And we may rejoice that the Kansas election of 1914 for- 
ever settles the saloon question in this state. That vote em- 
phasizes as never before that prohibition is a distinctive 
political policy of Kansas. There can be no turning back- 
ward from the course which has brought such manifold 
blessings to our people. We may confidently expect the 



212 FIRST INAUGURAL 

liquor evil, like murder, arson and highway robbery, to 
show itself at times, but I promise you this administration 
will not for a single moment relax the most searching, 
stringent, vigorous and continuous enforcement of the pro- 
hibitory law. There cannot be any temporizing with this 
thing, nor should there be any compromise with its partner 
in crime, the redlight district. 

To Lead in National Prohibition. 

The record Kansas has made in proving that prohibition 
does prohibit; the blessings which have followed its enact- 
ment as a part of our fundamental law, makes it incumbent 
upon us as a duty to the nation as well as a policy of self- 
protection, to take the lead in an active propaganda for 
national prohibition. We must make the happy conditions 
we have achieved known to the world. To this extent we 
are emphatically ' ' our brother 's keeper. ' ' We cannot evade 
the responsibility. It is our duty to say to the people of the 
United States: "The public health, the public peace, the 
public morals, and the public welfare demand the complet-e 
eradication of the saloon and tlie absolute prohibition of its 
wretched and destructive traffic." 

Many of us who live in Kansas and have learned to take 
prohibition as a matter of course, do not fully appreciate 
the intensity and the proportions of the struggle now wag- 
ing in every part of the United States for national prohibi- 
tion. The victory is coming just as surely as the American 
people retain their sanity and judgment. But the battle 
will not be won without herculean effort. From this time 
forward until the question is settled and settled rightly, 
national prohibition will be one of the big issues — possibly 
the chief issue — in every national political campaign; and 
Kansas must lead the battle. 

Pledges Vigorous Championship. 

Wo liavc had nation-wide prohibition in all the great 
American industries for nearly 10 years. National prohibi- 



EQUAL SUFFRAGE FOR ALL 213 

tion itself should no longer be delayed. It will not be long 
in coming if Kansas people give the movement their active 
leadership and their vigorous championship. I here pledge 
you that my utmost endeavor shall be to aid this movement, 
to use all the influence I possess, as a citizen, as a news- 
paper man, and as a public official, to advance this great 
cause. 

I rejoice with the people of Kadsas that the women of our 
state have been admitted to the full rights of citizenship. 
By the large vote they cast at the recent election, they have 
shown a ready willingness to assume their new responsibili- 
ties and have made certain that we may expect a higher 
standard in public affairs and especially in public morals 
as a result. The influence of Kansas should be exerted in 
every possible way to bring about equal suffrage in the 
nation. 

Try as we may, we move slowly toward the ultimate goal 
of mankind — the brotherhood of man. In the two years we 
are now entering upon, may We people of Kansas do our 
part in that slow but sure advance in human progress ; for 
loftier ideals; for a wider and deeper justice; for a quick- 
ened sense of public honor and public duty ; toward making 
our beloved state a little cleaner, a little more decent, hap- 
pier, and more God-like. 



SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

Delivered in Representative Hall, the State Capitol, 
Topeka, Kan., January 8, 1917. 

Fellow Citizens : For the second time, I have come to 
this chamber to register my sacred promise to the people of 
Kansas — a promise to serve them all faithfully, honestly 
and fairly. After two years in public office, in closer con- 
tact with the people of my native state than ever before, I 
have today greater pride in my state, more intense love for 
my country and a broader, deeper faith in humanity. I 
have had disappointments, I have made mistakes, but I 



214 SECOND INAUGURAL 

believe as I have never before believed in the patriotism, 
the integrity, the good sense and the noble intentions of the 
Kansas people. In this most important respect, my pride 
and my faith in Kansas have deepened and strengthened. 
It is a far greater honor and a much greater responsibility 
than thousands of us appreciate — or have opportunity of 
appreciating — to be chosen the chief executive of such a 
people and of such a stat^. 

I shall not attempt here today to set forth in detail an 
elaborate legislative program. I have no panacea to offer 
for our social and political ills. The most I can do is to 
point out the urgent need of certain improvements in the 
conduct of the public business and certain desirable re- 
forms in our social system for which I believe our people 
are now more than ready. Then to pledge to you my 
earnest efforts in effecting these reforms and to ask your 
sincere and whole-hearted co-operation in such of my sug- 
gestions as appeal to your common sense. 

I beg you to remember that your co-operation is of 
greater importance than the zeal or the good intentions or 
the high purpose of any governor or individual leader. 
Good government is a matter of good citizenship, and good 
citizenship is personal. 

Time to Modernize Government. 

Two years ago I voiced in my first utterance as governor, 
the need of Kansas for a more modern system of transacting 
its public business. The appreciation of that need has 
grown upon me, and I believe upon the people. It is no- 
torious that the state, the county and the city have lagged 
behind private corporations and individual firms in adopt- 
ing business methods of proved efficiency and economy. 
This is partly due to an easy-going lethargy which worships 
precedent and resents change. But the people now are 
ready for an immediate reorganizing of our unvneldy and 
wasteful system ; for eliminating unnecessary boards, com- 
missions and officers ; for concentrating authority and re- 



A MORE MODERN SYSTEM 215 

sponsibility — in short for adopting the same business prin- 
ciples in public affairs that they use so successfully in their 
private business. 

This, I think, is plain business sense. The state, county 
or city should no more hesitate or neglect to adopt labor- 
saving, time-saving, money-saving methods than it would 
hesitate to adopt labor-saving machinery or labor-saving 
office appliances. The people of Kansas want whatever 
tends to eliminate a waste of time or a waste of money. 
They want more direct methods in dealing with public 
affairs and in the transaction of public business. The 
rapidly-increasing cost of every supply purchased by the 
state, makes it almost inevitable that appropriations for the 
mere maintenance of state institutions will be greater than 
those of two years ago. On every side pressure will be 
brought to bear for the making of improvements, for ex- 
pansion, for increased facilities. The need in many quar- 
ters is great, and Kansas is not niggardly. With such de- 
mands upon the people's money it is imperative that a 
scientific, systematic method be adopted ; that the cost of 
administration be reduced to the minimum ; that no public 
funds be M'^asted thru red tape formalities; that the state 
get 1 00 cents value for every dollar it spends. Political red 
tape is the most expensive kind of dry goods we buy and the 
most useless. 

New Constitution if Necessary. 

But it is not only in the interest of economy that a re- 
vision of the machinery of government is demanded. The 
business man who has a lax system of bookkeeping, who con- 
ducts his business by slipshod methods, encourages graft 
and dishonesty and inefficiency among his employes. If 
they go wrong a part of the responsibility rests with him. 
Likewise the state which retains slipshod methods in the 
conduct of its affairs is putting a premium upon ineffi- 
ciency and looseness and waste and dishonesty on the part 
of its employes. If you do not insist upon strict business 



216 SECOND INAUGURAL 

methods, and provide a business-like system of government, 
you, yourselves, are to blame for the shortcomings and in- 
efficiency of the men elected or appointed to serve you. 
The question is as much one of public morals as of public 
economy. The purpose of government is not to furnish 
jobs to vote getters. It is not to supply fat contracts to 
business men who may have contributed liberally to the 
campaign fund. We must get away forever from the ide* 
that public office is a reward of anything other than abilitj 
and industry and fitness for the duties of the office. We 
must seek for expert management of all public affairs, for 
Qieu trained in the work required of them ; we must elin? 
inate the sinecures, cut out the figure-heads, make it im- 
possible for an incompetent, who depends upon deputies tr 
do his work, to hold a place in the i^ublic service. And this 
I say, is as much in the interest of public morals, as in th*" 
interest of economy and efficiency. I believe public senti 
ment in Kansas is ripe for this step forward, and that the 
people of Kansas will be sorely disappointed if a good start 
in that direction is not made by the legislature convening 
tomorrow. It may be that some of the reforms most needed 
in state and county and city government will require 
changes in the state constitution, but this should not deter 
us. The time probably is close at hand when the needs of 
this progressive people will make imperative a constitiJi 
tional convention for a general revision of the organic law? 
of the state. The chief objection to such a convention that 
has been urged in the past no longer exists ; prohibition of 
the liquor traffic is a fundamental of Kansas government 
which nothing can overthrow, it will always remain an in 
tegral part of the Kansas law and of the Kansas religion. 
But Kansas does not and Kansas never will consider the 
liquor question settled until Kansas prohibition has driven 
the last saloon from the nation. And that won't be long. 

Build Up Common Schools. 
Kansas needs better and greater school facilities, espe- 
cially in the rural districts. Much as. we boast of our pros- 



DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION 217 

perity and our progressive spirit, we are not keeping pace 
here with many sister states. Too many of our boys and 
girls leave the common school with only a smattering of the 
rudiments of education. I believe with all thinking men 
that the common schools of America are the very basis of 
our national existence. Modern civilization has made life 
strenuous and complex. Competition is keener and fiercer. 
The youth who enters upon it without adequate training, 
vocational as well as intellectual, will find life hard indeed. 
1 don't want this to happen to any Kansas boy. 



Free School Text Books. 

I want to see in Kansas more democracy in education; 
more of the training of hand and mind and heart that will 
equip the average boy and girl for the everyday work of 
human life. I want to see free text books for every boy and 
girl in the schools of Kansas. I believe in the higher edu- 
cation: Kansas must keep her university and other state 
schools in the front rank; their rapidly increasing student 
body is a credit to the state; we should be sadly remiss in 
our duty if we hampered or retarded their growth or im- 
paired their efficiency. But first of all our common school 
system must be made adequate to the proper training for 
life of every youth of school age in Kansas. It is the state 's 
most important duty. Our whole future hangs upon it. 
And it is a fundamental principle of democracy. Take care 
of the youth of the land and the geniuses will take care of 
themselves. The world needs scholars and philosophers and 
scientists and poets and artists — Kansas will produce her 
share of them all — but more than that the world needs mil- 
lions of alert, wdde-awake, clear-thinking, right-living men 
and women who live the common life and do the world's 
work and keep civilization from degenerating. Kansas 
must produce these useful citizens first! The common 



218 SECOND INAUGURAL 

school is our nursery for citizens. It makes or it breaks the 
future of our boys and girls. 

Kansas Needs Good Roads. 

Next to the improvement of the common schools the 
greatest need of rural Kansas is better public highways. 
Good ro .ds are not merely a product of civilization ; they 
are civil izers. I need not dwell upon the economic aspect of 
this question; it is well understood. We are ready for a 
comprehensive and practical system of road-making and 
maintenance in Kansas. This calls for a complete revision 
of our antiquated methods of road tixes and upkeep. Our 
present plan is enormously wasteful. In the day when a 
day's journey was a few miles, roads may have been a local 
question. Today they are more than that. Motor transpor- 
tation of products is a rapidly coming development, and no 
state needs it more than Kansas, Avhich suffers great losses 
annually from car shortage. This phase of road-making 
applies chiefly to trunk line roads and roads to market 
towns. In the m lin a better system of dragging roads will 
work wonders. We are spending millions on Kansas roads 
uselessly. In this respect we are good roads spendthrifts. 
We should learn how to use the money before greatly in- 
creasing this amount. 

Industrial Development. 

K;'nsas is and always will be an agricultural state; but 
this need not interfere in the least with the development 
within our borders of industries which will supply our own 
people, at least, with many of the commodities of ordinary 
use. It is bad economy and poor business for us to ship our 
raw products 500 or 1,000 miles to be converted into fin- 
ished products to be shipped back to us. Kansas needs more 
manufactories ; to give employment to our labor ; to create 
a home market for our farmers ; to increase our wealth and 
to help support public work. Kansas goods for Kansas 



THE OPPORTUNITY FOR FACTORIES 219 

people would keep Kansas money in Kansas pockets. There 
is probably little that the state can do officially at the pres- 
ent time to promote our industrial development ; what your 
representatives here in Topeka can do should be done; but 
the initiative must come from the people of the state, mani- 
fested in a livelier interest and a willingness to invest in and 
encourage and patronize manufacturing enterprises suited 
to Kansas conditions. Let our slogan be : Kansas goods for 
Kansas people. 

Honest Receiverships for Utilities. 

In the last year the payment of fees aggregating nearly 
one-third of a million dollars to the receivers and attorneys 
in the Kansas Natural gas case, directed public attention 
anew to a form of graft too long tolerated. With the sanc- 
tion of courts, enormous sums of money out of all propor- 
tion to the services rendered, were paid to a score of law- 
yers. One was a state official sworn to safeguard the in- 
terests of the state and its people. Stripped of all legal 
pretense and high-sounding, mealy-mouthed verbiage, it 
was a plain case of robbing the people in the name of the 
law, for in the end the people will pay every cent of the 
tribute. It was piracy worthy of the black flag. I consider 
highway robbery more respectable and less dishonorable. 

I am in favor of placing in the hands of the public utili- 
ties commission the power of appointing receivers for all 
public utilities which become insolvent or which fail to 
render the service for which they Avere created — just as the 
appointing of receivers for insolvent banks is now in the 
hands of the state bank commissioner. The receiver ap- 
pointed should be a person thoroly competent, and his com- 
pensation or salnry should be limited to a sum in keeping 
with that paid by similar companies in the ordinary con- 
duct of their business. I shall urge the legislature to enact 
such a law as the only means of putting an end to a species 
of plunder that has become a scandal to the courts and the 
state, resulting not only in a wicked waste of money, but 



220 SECOND INAUGURAL 

what is worse, in lowering the tone of public morals. It is 
always the indirect results of graft in high places that are 
most pernicious in their influence upon the community. 

Keep Up Fight for Prohibition. 

Kansas may, with all modesty, I think, lay claim to ele- 
ments of leadership in many political reforms and in many 
humanitarian movements but nothing that Kansas has done, 
not even the heroic part she played in the great struggle 
for human liberty in the '60s, has added so greatly to the 
sum total of human happiness as her vigorous espousal of 
the cause of prohibition of the liquor traffic. In the long 
struggle for prohibition extending over a generation, Kan- 
sas has been the leader, the inspiration, the beacon of hope. 
In the campaign of 1916, when prohibition was an issue in 
twelve states and one territory, Kansas played a most im- 
portant part. And now when nation-wide prohibition is in 
sight, the battle nearly won, when this iniquitous traffic is 
making its last stand, Kansas must do still more to hasten 
the day when the sale and manufacture of intoxicants shall 
forever be prohibited and the nation be purged of this 
plague and sore. America is ready for it. I believe we 
shall see a sober nation without a groggery, a brewery or a 
distillery within its borders. Until that happy day dawns, 
Kansas must protest unceasingly against the nefarious part- 
nership of the federal government with the infamous traffic. 
It is intolerable that the United States government should 
ar])itrarily override and defy the sovereignty of the com- 
monwealths which have prohibition laws. The federal gov- 
ernment ignores the laws of our state and for a considera- 
tion grants licenses to men to conduct in Kansas a business 
which our state statutes have outlawed. Indirectly, it is 
aiding and abetting violations of our state laws — conniving 
witli bootleggers and outlaws in defeating the will of our 
own people. Moreover, the government says in effect to 
Kansas, "No matter what your people may think of this 
evil ; no matter how you may legislate against it, you. shall 



PROHIBITION SHOULD BE NATIONAL 221 

not prohibit shipment of the stuff into your borders, and 
Washington will license bootleggers to sell the damnable 
•tuff. ' ' The government manifests more concern to observe 
«omity between itself and other nations than between itself 
and the several states. I appeal to you, my friends, indi- 
ridually, to take up this protest against setting our laws at 
naught. 

Predicts National Suffrage. 

Kansas people may assist, too, in another great reform 
tliat is making rapid headway in the nation, and that is 
national suffrage for women. Our influence should be 
exerted to bring about equal suffrage in every state in the 
Union ; the highest considerations of the public welfare de- 
mand it. In Kansas, as in other states, woman's influence 
has been on the side of legislation for clean government. 
She has exercised her right of franchise with intelligence 
and independence, and it is inconceivable that the nation 
should much longer deny her what is unquestionably her 
right. 

Support League for Peace. 

It is impossible for us to realize the appalling suffering 
and sorrow that has come upon Europe. As the records of 
battles grow longer, as the carnage increases, day after day 
and month after month, our sensibilities become blunted. 
Still, my friends, even if it were possible for us to close our 
eyes entirely to Europe's woe and to harden our hearts 
against its supreme distress and need — war is a very real 
thing to us. As long as war exists; as long as nations de- 
liberately plan for this barbarous method of settling their 
disputes, as long as men put their trust in might instead of 
right, so long will the danger of war brood like a foul bird 
of prey over this land and over every land. 

We hear much of the necessary preparation to meet the 
economic crisis which threatens America at the close of the 
European conflict. And this is well. We must give thought 



222 • SECOND INAUGURAL 

to the welfare aud prosperity of our people. We must see 
that our trade is not ruined ; that our labor is not idle ; that 
our dpital is not unemployed. But of how much greater 
consequence is it that we see to it this awful thing shall be 
no more ! How much more important is it that mankind 
shall rise up and say to its rulers, to its parliament, to its 
congresses ; ' ' There shall be no more war ! ' ' 

The millions of men — the flower of the Twentieth Cen- 
tury — ^who died — were victims of the mad folly of insane 
rulers, drunk with power! When shall such colossal wick- 
edness be made impossible? 

America — Kansas — has no higher duty than to join with 
the sober-thinking men of all nations, in a world-wide move- 
ment to make future wars impossible. It may not come 
within the province of your state government to participate 
officially in this movement, but as your governor I appeal 
to you to join actively in the movement, to take it close to 
your hearts, to make it a part of your personal duty to hu- 
manity. I believe of the several plans proposed, the League 
of Nations to Enforce Peace, headed by former President 
Taft, while not as yet perfected in all details, to be the most 
feasible and practical. Every man who loves his country ; 
every man who loves humanity, ought to affiliate himself 
with the movement. I hope to see Kansas do her full part 
in this epoch-making work. 

The Real Americanism. 

I believe the public conscience has been awakened, and 
that we have been baptized with a new patriotism — an ex- 
alted Americanism, that is keenly find iutelligently prac- 
tical and will not be denied. It is demanding a]id gradu- 
ally obtaining a schooling for boys and girls that annuallj'' 
will not turn great masses of them adrift without knowledge 
that will mnke them capable and self-supporting. It is in- 
sisting that drink and prostitution, the great twin scourge 
of humanity, shall not be permitted to ruin America. It is 
urging living wages, wholesome homes and happy family 



A NEW BAPTISM 223 

life for all its workers. It is insisting on prompt and ready 
justice for the poor litigant and the rich litigant. It is de- 
manding simpler forms of government, administered by 
trained experts rather than by seat-warmers and hangers- 
on. It is insisting upon laws so drawn that they discourage 
rather than encourage litigation. It is compelling the hon- 
est, efficient and economical expenditure of public funds 
for the benefit of all the people, and it is demanding its 
public servants shall know their work and do it faithfully, 
loyally, industriously and w^ell, while serving one and only 
one master. 

This I believe to be the Kansas ideal — the American 
ideal. We cannot expect to attain it at one bound. Prece- 
dent is stubborn, and change is frightful to timid souls. 
But the great mass of our people are moving forward, 
slowly but surely, with a deeper appreciation of justice, of 
fair dealing, of that broad brotherly love which is the only 
foundation of a Christian democracy. 



FAREWELL ADDRESS. 

Delivered in Representative Hall, the State Capitol, To- 
peka, Kan., on the Occasion of Governor Capper Turning 
Over the Office to His Successor, Hon. Henry J. Allen, 
of Wichita, January 7, 1919. 

We have met here today to induct into office the public 
servants to whom the people of Kansas have entrusted the 
affairs of state for the next two years. It is a grave respon- 
sibility we lay upon them. The whole fabric of the social 
order in a large portion of the earth is being torn apart and 
made over. Measures of fundimental and mighty signifi- 
cance confront every government in both hemispheres. 
While Kansas will not be called upon to grapple directly 
with world problems, she cannot expect to escape, even in 
affairs of the most local nature, the influence of the mighty 
currents of the changing order. Altho Kansas has not been 



224 FAREWELL ADDRESS 

over-run by contending armies; altho our cities and farm- 
steads have not been desolated by charge and counter- 
charge; vi'^hile it is our hearts alone that have been torn by 
war, we, too, have our work of reconstruction. Politically 
and economically we must readjust ourselves to the nevr 
world which will rise from the holocaust. And we can 
hardly be Kansans, true to the genius of our race, if we 
neglect or fail to have a part — so far as human agencie* 
may go — in shaping that new world. 



We have .just closed the most momentous year of modern 
history. It has fallen to us of this generation to bring to an 
end the autocratic rule of might, and to make possible the 
reign of Liberty and right thruout the earth. In tliis great 
drama whicli we fondly believe marks the beginning of a 
new epoch in the history of the race, Kansas has had the 
privilege of playing a part in full keeping with her re 
sources of men and means. We have given freely and loy- 
ally of our sons and our wealth. 

More than 81,000 men from Kansas have served with the 
colors and over 4,000 of them have made the supreme sacri- 
fice. We have lent to the government and contributed as a 
free-will offering to the several war activities more than 
210 million dollars. But of deeper significance has been 
the fervor and patriotic zeal Kansas has shown; the forget- 
fulness of self and the subordination of personal interests ; 
the alacrity and the unanimity with which the state has 
responded to every call ; the high determination to make 
eYQvy sacrifice needed to attain our great end. ' ' Our lives 
and our fortunes" have truly been placed upon the altar of 
our country. Kansas misunderstood, misrepresented, even 
villified before the day of actual conflict, has no apology to 
make to the world for her attitude or conduct during these 
stirring days. She did not falter in the time of trial. 

Tlie men who fought our battles for us, those who went 
overseas, and those in camps on this side, chafing under 
the routine of drill, impatient "to get into the big game." 



MUST CURB BOLSHEVISM 225 

are already returning'to us and their accustomed places in 
our community. 1 know my Kansas well enough to know 
the welcome you will give them. I know the appreciative 
reception that awaits them. And I am certain that the most 
of them will come back with higher ideals, with a broader 
vision, with a greater love of country and keener apprecia- 
tion of duties of citizenship. Woe to us if we fail to keep 
alive that spirit of service, in them and in ourselves, which 
this war has engendered. On them will fall the burden of 
responsibility for the state 's well-being in the next quarter 
century. They come back to take up the world's work in 
Kansas; our government, our schools, our business, our 
press, our churches will be largely what they make them. 
If they have sensed the import of the struggle in which they 
have engaged as I believe they have ; if they come back with 
the idealism of true democracy ; if they are imbued with the 
spirit of service ; if they have caught a glimpse of the mean- 
ing of the brotherhood of man, God help us, if we are not 
ready to join hands with them in a program that looks to a 
fuller life under happier conditions. 

The epidemic of Bolshevism, spreading so rapidly in 
Europe, carries a warning for America. It is the outgrowth 
of despair, the politics of hysteria. It is a disease certain 
to appear whenever conditions become unbearable. The 
morals of the nation break down and the people run amuck 
in a blind effort to redress their wrongs. It is mob rule; 
government without steering wheel or rudder. This dan- 
gerous state of mind is highly contagious ; it is not impos- 
sible for America to contract the disease. We know that 
the spirit of unrest, the chafing under the impositions of in- 
justice, is not confined to the struggling masses of Europe. 
We know that a world which has fought as never men 
fought before, to overthrow hereditary privilege will not 
for long brook injustice at the hnnd of other privilege 
wrested from the hands of the people. We know that a 
world which has crushed a conscienceless Junkerism will 
not endure a conscienceless monopoly. We know that a 



226 FAREWELL ADDRESS 

world which revolted at autocracy, will eventually over- 
throw a moiiey-made aristocracy. "We know that the world 
has fought to establish democracy among the people of the 
earth, and all the Bourbons and Tories in creation shall not 
avail against them. The best, indeed, the only preventive 
of radical socialism and the anarchy of Bolshevism is to 
remove the contributive causes. We must so shape our pro- 
gram of reconstruction that those who have fought for 
democracy and those who have so valiantly worked at home 
in support of our cause, shall never feel that they have 
striven in vain. The man who works with his hands, the 
struggling farmer and shop keeper, the mechanic and 
tradesman, must all be able to see that this has become a 
better world, and we a happier nation because of our sacri- 
fices and our stand for right and justice. No American 
must ever have cause to feel that Big Business or the poli- 
ticians have been the only beneficiaries of the Great War. 

This is not the time nor the occasion for a discussion of 
the details of our program of reconstruction. More than 
3% millions enlisted men and officers, and other millions 
of workers in war industries must speedily be reabsorbed 
into our ordinary business and trade and professions. And 
millions of women engaged in unusual occupations at un- 
usual wages must be taken into the calculation. New trade 
relations must be established with every nation. Tariffs 
and duties must be adjusted. Unoccupied land whether 
held by the government or by land speculators, must be 
opened to settlement, improved and occupied. Arid regions 
must be irrigated; and vast swamps and marshes drained 
and reclaimed. The universal use of the automobile and 
the motor truck makes imperative a long delayed system 
of highway construction. The public school, ever regarded 
as the bulwark of our liberties "the cheap defense of the 
nation," must be broadened and strengthened and made 
more efficient ; not only must illiteracy be wiped out, but 
the training given must be carried to greater length and 
every youth of the land made fit for a life of useful en- 



CHECK INSATIATE GREED 227 

deavor. And the English language must be made the basis 
of our education, in both public and private schools. 

The flotsam and jetsam of society, the criminals and de- 
generates, the morally and mentally unfit, almost univer- 
sally spring from one or two conditions or a combination 
of both ; abject poverty or drunkenness. I have unbounded 
faith in an early banishment of booze from the United 
States; in the triumph of that fond dream of Kansas, 
national prohibition. But immeasurably blessed as that 
consummation will be, no sane prohibitionist thinks it a 
panacea for all the social and economic ills of the nation. 
If the faces of the poor are ground, if life for the "common 
people, ' ' the hewers of wood and drawers of water, is made 
unbearable thru greed and injustice, poverty and slum-life 
will still exist ; and where there is hopeless, sodden poverty 
with bad environment and squalid living conditions, there 
is certain to be crime. The wealth that America has pro- 
duced in the last 50 years has excited the wonder and envy 
of the world. But our big enterprises have too often been 
reared at the expense of the life 's blood of the people. We 
have reared magnificent palaces and surrounded them by 
hovels. Destructive, short-sighted, sordid, conscienceless 
greed for big profits and high dividends has led to an or- 
ganized exploitation of this country which has resulted in 
living conditions for vast masses of people that could not 
fail to impair the physical, mental and moral health of the 
nation. This must stop — stop now. Insatiate greed must 
be curbed. The producers of the nation must be given 
their full opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness. ' ' 

That, my fellow citizens, must be the American program 
to which every one of us must devote himself unselfishly or 
with a wiser farther-seeing selfishness. It is a program of 
the sort of democracy for which the world has just so great 
a price. It can be bought no other way. And, after all, 
there is nothing revolutionary about it; it is simply plain, 
straight-forward, Declaration-of-Independence American- 



228 FAREWELL ADDRESS 

ism — the rock upon which this nation is founded. That 
must be the test applied from this day forward to every 
measure of reconstruction; on tliat we must build for the 
future. If we hew to the line all will go well. 

It is a new birth the nation will undergo ; it is a new 
America that we shall create in the next decade. And woe 
betide us if, thru timid fear, thru incompetency, thru selfish 
partisanship, thru greed or class interest, we fail to meet 
the issues in a way that benefits America and her destiny. 
To do that will be to sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. 

The American people are ready to make this vision real. 
How nearly we shall attain it depends upon the vision, the 
courage, the wisdom of the men to whom you entrust the 
shaping of governmental policies. I know that the minds 
and the hearts of the Kansas people are in tune with these 
living principles. 

After four years in public office, in closer contact with 
the people of my native state than ever before, I leave the 
executive office today with greater pride in my state, more 
intense love for my country and a broader, deeper faith in 
humanity. And now that you have sent me to "the Ex- 
Governor's Club" at the National Capitol, I want to assure 
you that I shall endeavor with all my heart to help shape 
such a program as will bring the blessings of peace and 
prosperity to a happy, united- people. I shall, I trust, ever 
speak the Kansas language, and hold fast to Kansas ideals. 
I know of no wny in which I can be of greater service to my 
native state, to the nation and to my generation. 

It is not out of place, indeed, I should be strangely lack- 
ing if I did not take this occasion to express to the people 
of Kansas the grateful appreciation I feel becaiTse of their 
generous encouragement and the faith they have shown in 
me ?nd in the principles I have espoused. I have en- 
deavored during my four years tenure as governor to stand 
for tliat which is best and highest in the Kansas idc'^l of 
governmont tind society; to be truly representative of the 
Kansas spirit ; proving all things, holding fast to that which 



THE NEW GOVERNOR 229 

is good, but ever looking ahead and moving forward to 
better things and happier conditions. I believe we have 
made some progress in those four years. We have not gone 
far. The jdistance traversed seems pitiably short when we 
contemplate all that is yet to be accomplished ; but what 
progress we have made is due to the alert spirit of the 
Kansas people ; to their ready response to the call of ideals 
and determination to realize them; to their basically sound 
sense, to their strong purpose to go forward. I count my- 
self the most fortunate of men that I have been in accord 
with a people so loyal to their ideals, so true to their faith. 
And I am happy in my knowledge that my successor in 
this office is as thoro a Jayhawker as I dare to be. With 
voice — the most eloquent in Kansas — and with pen that 
laughs at folly and scorches injustice, he has fought the 
good fight for Kansas ideals, and comes to you with a con- 
structive program which I know will merit and receive your 
hearty support. I hope he may have at your hands the 
same manifestation of faith, the same co-operation, the same 
fair treatment that you have given me in such generous 
measure. You made him governor when his back was 
turned. You put this responsibility on him when he wasn 't 
looking. 

With greater pleasure than I can find words for, I intro- 
duce to you — who know him so well — Henry J. Allen, late 
Y man in France, the 23d governor of the state of Kansas. 



MESSAGES TO THE LEGISLATURE. 

Governor Capper's Message to the First Legislature During 
His Administration, January 12, 1915. 

Gentlemen of the Legislature: 

According to custom and the provisions of the Constitu- 
tion of Kansas, I submit these suggestions and recommen- 
dations upon those public matters which seem to me of im- 
mediate concern. 

You liave met to provide for a more expeditious conduct 
of public business; to make such changes in the statutes as 
time, experience and ever-changing conditions may indicate 
are required ; to enact such new legislation as the needs of 
the people demand. I am sure every member of both houses 
fully appreciates this responsibility. I hope I may be par- 
doned if in my zeal to do my part I remind you individu- 
ally that although you owe a duty to the district which you 
represent, your higher duty is to all the people of Kansas. 
The pressure of special interests, the demands of special 
sections of the state, the needs of friends, all must be sub- 
ordinated to the good of the people as a whole. "We are not 
here to legislate for any section, nor for any political party, 
but for the whole state, and "log rolling" and "swapping 
votes" and "playing politics" must have no place in our 
program. Nor should our time be frittered away in unim- 
portant local legislation in which the great body of the 
people have no interest. "We must be sure that our appro- 
priation bills are free from the taint of the "pork barrel." 
I urge both houses to adopt the rule that no member of the 
legislature from a district in which there is a state institu- 
tion shall be made a member of the "Ways and Means Com- 
mittee. 

Kansas is ripe for a constructive legislative program. 
The state is happily free from bitter partisan strife ; no one 

230 



EFFICIENT SERVICE NEEDED 231 

question of overshadowing importance divides us. We have 
an exceptional opportunity of giving to the problems which 
shall come before us the unbiased and non-partisan deliber- 
ation which should precede all legislation; of studying the 
needs of the state ; of investigating the evils and abuses of 
our political system ; of weighing the new demands of a new 
age; of giving the people of Kansas our most honest and 
conscientious and efficient service. 

This does not imply the enactment of a great number of 
laws. It is recognized that the tendency of our day is 
toward too much legislation — too many ill-advised, useless, 
contradictory and ambiguous laws, inevitably breeders of 
misunderstanding, strife and litigation. Your effort should 
be to simplify existing laws and to make every new enact- 
ment so simple that the most humble citizen may under- 
stand and respect it, so plain and explicit that the most 
powerful cannot evade it. 

Economy Through Efficiency. 

Kansas, in common with the other states, has experienced 
in the last decade an increase in the cost of government and 
the burdens of taxation, far beyond the increase of popula- 
tion. In 12 years public expenditures have increased 68 
per cent in the state ; 77 per cent in the county ; 153 per 
cent in the city ; 119 per cent in the township ; 132 per cent 
for schools. While most of this increase has been for local 
purposes (the state taxes being only $3,371,998 out of a 
total of $29,483,883 for the last tax year), the state should 
set an example of economy. It should keep down appro- 
priations to the very limit consistent with imperative de- 
mands. This is simply exercising the prudence that busi- 
ness men generally are practicing at this time. The increase 
in state expenditures is due partly to the enlarged func- 
tions of government, made necessary by new industrial con- 
ditions, by the establishing of new and needed state institu- 
tions, and by the increased cost of the necessities of life in 
the markets of the world. But a belief is growing in Kan- 



232 FIRST LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

sas, as elsewhere, that the business methods of the state and 
county governments have not kept step with the best 
metliods of the day ; that they are neither the most efficient 
nor the most economical. Kansas must rearrange and re- 
adjust its entire system of administration on a more scien- 
tific basis. Needless duplication of effort must be elim- 
inated, responsibility be concentrated and different depart- 
ments be co-ordinated. To do this, in my opinion, cannot 
fail to increase efficiency and to diminish cost — to give the 
people much better service for less money. 

In recent years the state has devoted much energy to 
regulating private or semi-public business, with beneficial 
results. It should now^ reorganize and regulate its own 
business. 

An All-State Efficiency and Economy Committee. 

I recommend and urge upon the legislature that it ap- 
point immediately a joint committee on efficiency and 
economy. After a thorough analysis of the present organ- 
ization of the state, county and township governments in 
Kansas, a study of what other states — notably Minnesota 
and Iowa — are doing to increase and concentrate the re- 
sponsibility of officials, to make their responsibility to the 
people more direct and to produce greater unity of action 
among the different departments of government, I hope 
this committee will present for the consideration of the 
legisl iture at this session, a plan of reorganization which 
shall abolish needless offices, boards and commissions, con- 
centrate and center responsibilities, eliminate duplication 
of authority and reduce the public business to a compact 
and smoothly working unit. This legislature has many 
members with wide experience in public affairs. I am con- 
vinced they can devise a plan in keeping with modern busi- 
ness systems, which ultimately will not only save money for 
the t 'xpayers of the state, but will greatly increavse and 
strengthen the efficiency of our government, bring men of 
highest grade and greatest ability into the public service, 



TOO MANY STATE BOARDS 233 

and relieve the public of the annoyance, expense and delay 
of unnecessary red tape. 

The committee should have the power to call to its aid 
such expert advice as it may require, and should invite the 
suggestions of business men and other citizens. 

Combine or Abolish Boards. 

I have no wish to define the scope of this committee's 
work, but I do desire to suggest that in my opinion the con- 
solidating of many state boards, commissions and offices 
can be effected with improvement rather than detriment to 
the public business. 

The state inspection system should be overhauled thor- 
oughly. Recently, the state auditor learned that six dif- 
ferent state inspectors had been in the same little town on 
the s:i.me day, doing work that one inspector probably could 
have done equally well. . 

The State Board of Irrigation should be immediately 
abolished. It is an absolute waste of the state's money to 
continue its existence. The work can easily be done by the 
present staff of the agricultural college. 

The judicial districts of the state may be reduced greatly 
in number without impairing the service of the courts or 
increasing the law's delay. 

The Board of Corrections can be abolished, and its duties 
performed by the Board of Control. 

The offices of hotel commissioner, two members of the 
State Barber Board, and oil inspector can all be abolished 
and theii" work done by existing employes in other depart- 
ments. 

Several state offices, the duties of which are purely ad- 
ministrative or clerical, such as the superintendent of in- 
surance, state printer, superintendent of public instruction, 
and possibly others, should, I believe, be made appointive 
instead of elective, in the interest of concentrating respon- 
sibility. 

County government can be simplified greatly by reorgan- 
izing and consolidating some of the offices, making others 



234 FIRST LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

appointive, and reducing salaries in keeping with the sal- 
aries paid by private business for the performance of simi- 
lar duties. 

I do not consider a constitutional convention necessary to 
accomplish these reforms. Most of these changes can be 
made under our present constitution; where they cannot, 
an amendment should be submitted to the people reducing 
the number of elective state offices and providing for four- 
year terms with the power of recall at any time. 

State and County Merit System. 
Any plan of administration which contemplates a con- 
centrating of responsibility is open to the dangers which 
follow the creation of a bureaucracy. But these dangers 
may be avoided by strengthening the merit system and ex- 
tending it to all branches of state and county government. 
We now have a civil service law applying to a few state 
institutions ; but the weakness of this law is apparent when 
we see how recklessly it has been disregarded and violated. 
We will never attain an efficient nor economic government 
until offices large and small are removed from the hands of 
spoilsmen. I urge the enactment of a civil service law so 
explicit and so strong that no partisan official will dare 
evade it, basing all rewards, promotions and salaries solely 
on merit, on loyalty and industry in the public service. 

Putlic Welfare. 
The conservation of human life and human resources is 
every year assuming a larger and larger place in American 
ideals of government. We are realizing that human life is 
the chief asset of the state ; and we are using our govern- 
mental machinery more and more, not only to maintain but 
also to increase and better the conditions of life and health 
and the social well-being of the people. We have learned 
already that if we are to perpetuate the state, we must not 
only produce citizens, but good citizens — men and women of 
sound bodies, clear minds and clean souls. We now consider 
as fundamental economic functions of the state, many duties 



BETTER CITIZENSHIP ESSENTIAL 235 

that were left a generation ago to chance. And this change 
in our attitude toward the life and health of the individual 
is not sentimental nor entirely humanitarian in its source; 
it is based on the soundest economic principles. 

No question which will come before you can be of more 
vital or far-reaching import than those problems which we 
have come to group under the general head of public wel- 
fare. It is our duty to see that our future citizens are well 
born; that they are properly nourished, and are reared in 
that environment most likely to develop in them their full 
capacity and powers. It is our duty to them, from motives 
of humanity, to ''give them a chance in life" ; it is our duty 
to the state, from an economic motive, to develop them into 
good and useful citizens for the state. 

This is all the more apparent when we consider the loss 
to Kansas in the preventable deaths of infants ; the expense 
to the state of the child rendered delinquent through pre- 
ventable disease, or the loss to the state through sub-normal, 
ill-formed, or badly nurtured children that cannot be de- 
veloped into the highest type of citizen. 

Needed Welfare Measures. 

To promote a higher type of citizenship, to insure to 
every child born in Kansas a record of birth, an equal share 
in the paternal care of the government and a recognition of 
its potential worth as a future citizen, I recommend the es- 
tablishment of a division of child hygiene as a part of the 
State Board of Health. This new division should take into 
account the circularizing of the expectant mother who ap- 
plies for information, the care of the new-born babe, and 
the well-being, health and nurture of the growing child. 

In the same general line of public welfare, I recommend 
the enactment of laws on the following subjects: 

1. To assist needy and worthy mothers by a compensa- 
tion which shall enable them to care for dependent minor 
children at home instead of their being cared for in insti- 
tutions. 



236 FIRST LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

2. To designate certain existing officials to comprise and 
act as an industrial welfare committee, with power to es- 
tablish and enforce wage schedules and to regulate the 
hours of women and minors in industry. 

3. To provide for the paying of convicts' earnings to 
tlieir dependent families, after a sufficient sum is deducted 
for the convict's maintenance. 

4. To give organized labor the right to select the officers 
of the State Labor Bureau. 

5. To help solve the problem of the unemployed by ex- 
tending the activities of the free employment bureau. • 

6. To strengthen the workmen's compensation act for 
the better protection of the workers. 

7. To promote the safety and safeguard the interests of 
railroad men and the traveling public. 

8. To compel employers to report promptly to the labor 
department all accidents occurring in factories or mines. 

9. To make child desertion by either father or mother a 
crime. 

10. To broaden the $200 tax exemption law by removing 
the discrimination against certain classes of women. 

11. To authorize cities of the first and second class to 
establish public loan institutions, that the loan shark evil 
may be abated. 

Stronger Rural Schools. 
Only 5 per cent of the boys and girls of Kansas ever go 
to college. For the 95 per cent whose only means of school- 
ing Ls the district or the city school, we must provide what 
we are not now providing, an education that will better fit 
them for the struggle of life. We have nothing more im- 
portant to consider than the teaching, the courses of study 
and the welfare of these primary schools and high schools. 
And it is vastly important that the farmers' children be as 
well provided for as the children of the towns and cities. 
"We spend more than a million dollars a year on our col- 
leges and university, and it is money well spent ; but we 
must have education that fits not the few but the many for 



KANSAS TRAVELING LIBRARY 237 

the business of life. Absolute thoroughness in the common, 
fundamental branches is necessary. A boy or girl who has 
gone through the eight grades should ' possess a complete, 
practical education and should have received special train- 
ing in some specific line of work, fitting him or her to earn 
a livelihood. Vocational work should be done in all the 
schools beginning with the fifth grade. Wherever condi- 
tions favor it, the establishing of a consolidated school or of 
a towTiship high school is worthy of much consideration. 
We should provide for and encourage a wider use of school 
plants, making of them educational and social centers for 
all tlie people throughout the year. 

I believe that the office of state superintendent of public 
instruction, as well as that of county superintendent, should 
be removed entirely from politics. 

An institution which supplements the work of the public 
schools and reaches every remote farmhouse in the state is 
the Kansas Traveling Library. In the last two years it has 
sent out a total of 61,250 books, reaching, it is estimated, 
300,000 persons. I recommend that ample funds for a con- 
tinuation of its good work be provided. 

Free Textbooks for Schools. 

All schoolbooks should be supplied to the children of 
Kansas free of cost. I recommend compulsory district and 
municipal owniership of such books. Twenty-one states now 
follow this plan successfully. I also favor a law, properly 
safeguarded, providing for the use of supplementary books. 

I am convinced the state can publish the textbooks needed 
for use in the common schools at a material saving to the 
people. During the last two years the state printing plant 
has been enlarged with this purpose in view. So far only 
three books have been issued. It is, of course, physically 
impossible for the state to undertake, during the next two 
years, the publishing of all the books to be required in the 
public schools of all grades. I therefore recommend that an 
appropriation be made sufficient to print such books within 



238 FIRST LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

the present capacity of the printing plant, as, in the judg- 
ment of the School Book Commission, are most immediately 
needed. 

Rural Credit Associations. 

Farming is our biggest business in Kansas. Our pros- 
perity, our progress, our very existence depend on it. It is 
a business in great need of financial relief. The farmers in 
Kansas are sorely in need of a credit system meeting their 
special requirements, that they may more readily obtain 
money on short or long time for their farming operations, 
or that they may become owners of farms. Our present 
system of credit is based on business as conducted in cities, 
where capital is turned quickly. In New York, Ohio, and 
in other states, this need has been met by legislation provid- 
ing for rural loan and savings associations similar to the 
building and loan associations in the cities. We should 
make it possible in Kansas for our numerous building and 
loan associations to extend their services to farmers under 
a law which also will encourage and permit rural communi- 
ties to organize co-operative loan associations to be under 
the supervision of the state banking department. New 
York state has a very comprehensive law of this kind. 

Co-operative Societies. 

The necessity for better organized farm industry in the 
United States is now generally regarded as urgent. Kansas 
has no adequate law encouraging and providing for the 
formation of farmer co-operative societies such as exist in 
the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa. 
As we live in one of the foremost agricultural states, we 
should not be backward in providing every condition which 
will aid our greatest industry. 

Abolish Nominating Petitions. 

Several amendments should be made to the primary and 
general election laws to improve them, but such changes 
must in no way interfere with a full and free expression of 



LIMIT CAMPAIGN EXPENSES 239 

the people's choice in naming the candidates to be voted on 
at general elections. The direct primary law of Kansas has 
become a part of our political system and our efforts should 
be to simplify it, to render it more direct, rather than to 
weaken or discredit it. 

I suggest that the law be modified to eliminate nomina- 
tion petitions, substituting therefor a small entrance fee. 
The names of judicial candidates at the primary should be 
printed upon each party ballot and not upon a separate 
ballot, that there may be a fuller expression of choice. 
Campaign expenditures should be limited to a reasonable 
sum commensurate with the salary of the office, so that a 
poor man may have the same opportunity as a rich man. 
Smoking in polling places should be prohibited. Two sets 
of judges and clerks of election should be provided for 
every congested precinct. 

Improvement of Roads. 

I am unreservedly in favor of the improvement of public 
highways. The framers of our constitution conferred this 
work on the counties. Until the people, by amendment, 
change the constitution, I urge that the counties co-operate 
with one another, that future road work be more uniform, 
and done in such a way that it will result in connected and 
continuous highways. I recommend such amendments be 
made to the present law. 

"We have found the best and cheapest road in Kansas is 
the dragged road. When the work is done at the right time 
the expense and labor of keeping it up is small. A well- 
organized drag system will do more to give any Kansas , 
county fine roads than the expenditure of a much greater 
amount of money in building and maintaining a single 
highway. The highways will come, but good community 
roads are our first need. 

Welcome Europe's Farm Workers. 
Following the war in Europe a large increase of Euro- 
pean immigration to the United States is to be expected, of 



240 FIRST LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

wliieli the largest part is and always has been made up of 
iiien skilled in farming. The farming interests of the United 
States may then obtain the better class of these immigrants, 
provided measures are taken to attract them before they 
ai-e dispersed to the manufacturing districts, for which they 
are poorly fitted. These immigrants will come here with 
their faith in American ideals made stronger than ever by 
the failure of the European system of government and 
diplomacy. They are a high type of farm workers. Kansas 
needs just such trained farm hands and farm tenants, and 
it will be wise to prepare to obtain our share of the most 
desirable of these immigrants. This can be done by attach- 
ing to one of the existing bureaus or departments of state 
an immigration agency that will keep in touch with the 
demand for such labor in the state and will supply printed 
matter, setting forth the attractions and opportunities Kan- 
sas has to offer to the farm workers of Europe. 

Remodel the Prison with Convict Labor. 
A non-partisan committee of experts was appointed 
under my predecessor to examine the penitentiary build- 
ings and make recommendations for their improvement. 
This commission has recommended that the penitentiary 
plant be remodeled and enlarged. I ask you to give its 
recommendation most careful attention. It is pointed out 
that the greater part of the raw materials for reconstruction 
is to be found on state property; that prison labor can be 
used for nearly all the work of construction, excepting the 
skilled sui)erintendenee ; that we can use all of the old plant 
which has value; that we can construct what will be virtu- 
ally a new penitentiary at a minimum of cost, and that a 
large number of prisoners, now unskilled men, can be 
trained to become skilled artisans, Avhich will more than 
double their earning power after their release. The present 
penitentiary was built a unit at a time with no definite 
plan. With the exception of the twine plant, it is in a 
dilapidated condition. It has been outgrown entirely by 
the advanced reformatory methods now approved by the 



UNIFORM ACCOUNTING URGED 241 

best seutiuieut iu the state and the best known criminol- 
ogists. 1 do not regard it as advisable to make a large ex- 
penditure at this time; however, I recommend that a rea- 
sonable appropriation be made to begin the work. 

Abolish the Fee System. 
The fee system of compensation for public services opens 
the way to abuses which are almost universally condemned. 
While fees as compensation have been abolished in connec- 
tion with most public offices, the system still remains in 
connection with certain state and county offices. I urge 
the enacting of a law which will abolish the fee system in 
state and county governments, as now conducted, and spe- 
cifically providing that all fees of whatsoever nature col- 
lected by public officials or employes shall be paid into the 
general revenue fund. 

Check Up County Officials. 

Our present system of handling county funds is loose, 
slipshod and utterly unbusinesslike. I recommend a law 
requiring the county clerk or county auditor to check all 
county officials at frequent intervals, to check out aU out- 
going officials and to check in all incoming officials. This 
is not provided for in our present system of county govern- 
ment. 

The states of Ohio and Indiana save a large sum of money 
annually by their system of uniform accounting in all 
county offices. I recommend that the state auditor be 
charged with the duty of prescribing and installing a uni- 
form system of bookkeeping in all counties of Kansas with 
as little delay as possible. 

Change in Banking Laws. 

In view of the radical changes recently made in our na- 
tional currency and banking system by the establishing of 
the federal reserve banks, I recommend that our state bank- 



242 FIRST LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

ing laws be so amended as to enable any state bank which 
so desires to avail itself of the provisions of the new fed- 
eral law. 

Keep Faith with the People. 

I particularly urge that the ways and means committees 
of each house report the appropriation bills at the earliest 
practical day, so that they may have careful consideration 
before the rush of the closing sessions. 

I recommend the adopting of the initiative and refer- 
endum; an amendment to the utility-commission law pro- 
hibiting the use of free railroad passes by members and 
employes of the commission; the enacting of a presidential 
primary law ; an amendment to the constitution to provide 
for a verdict in civil cases by three-fourths of the members 
of a jury; and the strengthening of the "blue-sky" law, so 
that there may be no question as to its constitutionality. 

The attention of the legislature is directed to the dis- 
graceful condition of the state house grounds, and to the 
lack of a proper system of lighting for the grounds and the 
capitol itself. 

In conclusion I wish to emphasize again the urgent neces- 
sity for a policy of strict economy. The suggestions and 
recommendations I have made do not in any instance call 
for the creation of new offices nor new boards and commis- 
sions, but provide for reducing the number of public offi- 
cials and increasing the duties and responsibilities of all in 
the public service. I earnestly appeal to the members of 
both branches of the legislature to lay aside partisan poli- 
tics ; to show the people that we are not here to make poli- 
tical capital nor campaign thunder; but as true patriots 
conscientiously to consider every question which comes be- 
fore us on its true merits in behalf of the best interests of 
Kansas. I believe this legislature will keep faith with the 
people. Respectfully submitted, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



SECOND MESSAGE. 

Governor Capper's Message to the Legislature that Con- 
vened January 10, 1917. 

Gentlemen of the Legislature : 

The Constitution of Kansas directs the governor at the 
opening of every session of the legislature to communicate 
in writing such information as he may possess in regard to 
the condition of the state, and to recommend measures he 
may consider expedient. I ask you to take the recommen- 
dations and suggestions I shall make as expressing my sin- 
cere belief of what this legislature can do and ought to do 
for Kansas, and not as a perfunctory document intended 
merely for the consumption of the populace. 

If this legislature will get down to business this after- 
noon; keep down to business every day for the next few 
weeks ; restrict the number of its employes to the minimum ; 
refrain from playing politics ; eliminate log-rolling ; abstain 
from pork ; kick out the grafters ; maintain a strict regard 
for economy; guard against the innocent-looking jokers the 
lobby will have ready to slip into bills ; transact all business 
in the open ; enact the legislation that we have promised the 
people, but make as few laws as possible ; refrain from legis- 
lation in behalf of special interests of any sort ; straighten 
out some of the worst tangles of our complicated code ; and 
then adjourn promptly and go home, the people of Kansas 
will rise up and call you blessed. 

The people are not clamoring for a great mass of new 
legislation. The legislature of 1915 passed 421 new laws — 
106 in the last 24 hours of the session — a large proportion 
of them unnecessary, if not positively detrimental. I hope 
we may set a new mark this year in the expeditious transac- 
tion of business and in giving time only to those measures 
that are really worth while. 

243 



244 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

1 do not mean to imply there is not an abundance of work 
for this legislature to do; there is work a-plenty — so much 
that the half of it cannot be done, unless we have the busi- 
ness-like, conscientious session which I hope we shall have. 

The Condition of the State. 

In a material way, Kansas was never before so prosper- 
ous. Our taxable wealth is now $2,980,894,837. It increased 
175 million dollars in the last two years and this does not 
include 100 million dollars of property belonging to 
churches, schools, lodges and other public institutions not 
taxed. 

Our taxable per capita wealth is $1,753. That this wealth 
is fairly evenly distributed is proved by the public utility 
companies of the state. They own only one-seventh of the 
state's total property, wliile the people own six-sevenths. 

Our bank deposits in round numbers aggregate 300 mil- 
lion dollars, an increase of 98 million dollars in two years. 

The people of Kansas own 114,323 automobiles, an in- 
crease of 63,878 in two years. 

Our farm products for 1916 aggregated 350 million dol- 
lars and our livestock 325 million dollars, an increase for 
the two of 25 million dollars in one year. 

Our manufactured products during the year, from tht 
best available information, amounted to 350 million dollars, 
an increa.se of 25 million dollars. 

Our transportation companies never did such a busineai 
as in the last year ; their facilities were overtaxed in carry- 
ing Kansas products. 

Kansas is one of the few states of the Union which has no 
.state bonded indebtedness, the last bond having been ean- 
cclcd last year. Our municipal bonds, bearing a low rate of 
interest, arc a prime favorite in the money-markets of th« 
world. Physically and financially, Kansas has every reason 
for congi-Htulation. 

Politically, Kansas happily is free from the more notor- 
ious forms of graft and public corruption which at time* 



CONDITION OF THE STATE 245 

have disgraced American commonwealths. Our people are 
law-abiding, and they demand the faithful performance of 
duty by their public servants. They have a large concep- 
tion of the functions of government, and they insist that we 
who are entrusted with its direction and administration, 
shall appreciate to the full our duty to the whole people 
and our responsibility for their welfare. Today they are 
giving more calm, sane, deliberate attention to government 
than ever before. No popular furor has excited them; no 
ism has swept them off their feet ; but deep in the conscious- 
ness of every thinking man and woman in Kansas is this 
thought : 

We are not doing the best we can do with our problem of 
self-government. We do not conduct the business of gov- 
ernment with the same efficiency that we conduct private 
affairs. We are more lenient with the shortcomings of 
public servants than with those of individual employes. We 
have relied too much upon the Bird o' Freedom, the Star 
Spangled Banner, political wind-jamming, and campaign 
buncombe, and not enough upon plain, business sense. Self- 
government has not failed. But we have not had self-gov- 
ernment. We have left government to precedent, and in- 
difference, and red tape, and expediency, and all the other 
attendants of mismanagement and bad government. And 
we pay the price in high taxes and poor service. 

That, gentlemen, is the Kansas state of mind. The people 
of Kansas in the last fiscal year paid $35,788,000 in state 
and local taxes, an increase of $1,900,000 over the preceding 
year. This year they will pay more. This is due partly to 
the increased cost of every commodity bought by the state 
and local governments, and partly to the enlarged functions 
of government which call for greater expenditures for the 
public welfare, but more than all is due to our antiquated, 
extravagant business system, which often calls for the ex- 
penditure of dollars where dimes would be amply sufficient. 

These two things: First, a sane, business-like overhaul- 
ing and reorganizing of our machinery of government, state 



246 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

and local, and second, a good start at least in the direction 
of a more equitable distribution of the burdens of taxation 
should have your chief attention and best efforts. 

Simplified and More Efficient Government. 

Kansas has admittedly outgrown our present system of 
government. It is a hodge-podge; a patch-work; anti- 
quated, cumbersome, wasteful, inefficient; entirely out of 
keeping with the more scientific systems of business now 
employed by private concerns and many other states. A 
multiplicity of boards, commissions, bureaus and depart- 
ments duplicate the work of one another, divide respon- 
sibility which should be concentrated, and by interfering 
with one another often retard the public business. They 
increase the cost of government without giving adequate 
return or efficient service to the public. Some of the de- 
fects of which the people complain are embedded in the 
state constitution, now more than 50 years old. Conse- 
quently there has arisen in many quarters an insistent de- 
mand for a new constitution. It seems only fair that the 
people of the state should be given an opportunity of de- 
ciding whether they desire the calling of a constitutional 
convention. The old objection to such a convention — the 
fear of endangering the prohibitory amendment — no longer 
exists; and if the people desire now to undertake this im- 
portant task, they should not be denied. 

In case the legislature in its wisdom should decide this to 
be an inopportune time for the consideration of the ques- 
tion of a constitutional convention, I recommend that an 
amendment to the constitution be submitted to the people 
permitting the submission to the people of an indefinite 
number of amendments at any general election, instead of 
three only, as the constitution now provides. This will make 
possible more consistent readjustment of our machinery of 
government than is possible under the three-amendment 
proviso. 



IMPROVEMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE 247 

Consolidation of Boards. 

In the meantime, while that issue is pending, there are 
many changes which this legislature can effect in the in- 
terest of greater economy of effort and money. There 
should be a general consolidation of boards, commissions 
and offices wherever such consolidating will simplify the 
machinery of administration and effect economy. 

I desire to call your attention to the report of the effi- 
ciency and economy commission created by the legislature 
of 1915, and ask that you give careful consideration to its 
recommendations, especially its suggestion for consolidating 
and co-ordinating state bureaus and departments; that the 
four boards now in charge of the state institutions, namely : 
The board of administration, the board of control, the board 
of corrections and the board of managers of soldiers ' homes 
be abolished; and that the state schools, penal institutions, 
charitable institutions and soldiers' homes be placed under 
one board, to be appointed by the governor, composed of a 
director of educational institutions, a director of penal in- 
stitutions, a director of charitable institutions, a director of 
soldiers' homes, with the governor ex officio member and 
chairman, empowered to appoint a business manager and 
purchasing agent for all state institutions. If this consoli- 
dation is made, honorary boards could be provided to coun- 
sel and advise with the heads of the educational institutions 
in regard to policies affecting the welfare and management 
of the schools. 

Our present system, under which a variety of boards re- 
ceive bids and purchase supplies separately for the various 
institutions, is neither business-like nor economical. Other 
states have effected a great saving through creating the 
position of expert purchasing agent with power to take ad- 
vantage of market conditions. I am convinced that a high- 
grade, experienced business man in this position, as business 
manager and purchasing agent for the four classes of state 
institutions, will save the people thousands of dollars and 
at the same time improve the public service. 



248 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

1 also reconiinend consolidating all departments pertain- 
ing to agriculture into a department of agriculture in 
charge of a commissioner, similar to the plan followed by 
the national government. It should include the state board 
of agriculture, the departments of horticulture, livestock, 
grain inspection, entomology, dairy, stallion registration, 
feeding stuffs, veterinary, forestry, and possibly others. 
Not only would this reduce the cost of maintaining these 
departments, but the benefits resulting from a more closely 
correlated administration Avould be many. 

I believe departments employing inspectors, such as the 
health, labor, fire and hotel departments, may by co-opera- 
tion greatly reduce the expense of state inspection and 
eliminate many sinecure jobs. 

I am heartily in favor of the commission's recommenda- 
tion that the state tax commission be abolished and its 
duties placed in the hands of a single officer to be known 
as the state tax commissioner. 

Reduce the Number of Judicial Districts. 
The state has too many judicial districts. There is great 
inequality of business in them. A log-rolling lobby smoth 
ered a bill in the house to reduce the number of districts, 
after the senate had passed it at the last .session. I recom- 
mend a similar bill be passed at this session, reducing the 
number of judges, and empowering the chief justice of the 
supreme court to transfer judges from one district to an- 
other when the work of a court has become congested, thus 
distributing the work more uniformly. Such a measure will 
reduce expenses and help in cleaning up cluttered court 
dockets. 

An Executive Budget System. 
\ recommend adopting the executive budget system of 
making appropriations, requiring the governor to submit to 
the legislature a carefully prepared schedule of the finan- 
cial needs of the state, showing where and why increases, 
if any, are demanded. Our present haphazard spending of 



LENGTHEN OFFICE TENURE 249 

public moneys inevitably leads to pork-barrel legislation 
and inequalities and injustices demoralizing to the public 
service. At the governors' conference in Washington last 
month the 24 governors present were unanimously of the 
opinion that this system marks a most important forward 
step in legislative methods. It is not revolutionary in its 
effect ; it merely introduces system into state expenses. The 
governor has no more power under it than under the pres- 
ent order ; all that the budget plan does is to substitute fore- 
sight for hindsight ; to substitute a unified coherent plan of 
distribution of the state 's appropriations for a patched and 
incoherent plan. I earnestly urge the adoption of the Mary- 
land budget system for Kansas with such modification as 
is necessary to meet any needs peculiar to the state. 

Four-Year Term of Office. 

I recommend that all terms of office in state and county 
be made four years with all elective officers subject to 
recall. The saving in election expenses alone will amount 
to thousands of dollars, and I believe the service will be 
greatly improved and that there will be fewer scrambles 
for public place. 

Simplified Cou7ity Government. 

The most extravagant and wasteful branch of govern- 
ment is that of the county in its present form. County 
taxes have nearly doubled in the last 10 years, increasing 
from $4,882,335 in 1906 to $8,942,736 in 1916. With all our 
complaint of increased taxation, it seems incredible that no 
effort has been made by the legislature to curb extrava- 
gance at this source, where it is greatest. We have some- 
times seemed to begrudge the money required for the main- 
tenance of state institutions, even to the extent of hamper- 
ing their growth, development and usefulness, when in 
reality the money required for them is but a small part of 
the public revenues. We have been saving at the spigot 
and wasting at the bunghole. 



250 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

Every county now elects 13 or more county officers, sev- 
eral of which are unnecessary. Commission form of govern- 
ment for the counties is worthy of serious consideration, 
but it is doubtful if it can be adopted without changing the 
constitution. In the meantime, a number of county offices 
can be abolished or combined. For example, the office of 
register of deeds can easily be dispensed with and its duties 
given to the county clerk. Legislation in this direction 
should not take effect earlier than expiration of terms of 
present incumbents. 

The City Manager for Cities. 

The citizens of any city in Kansas may safely be trusted 
to devise and revise the method of their own local govern- 
ment, in accordance with their desires and to meet their 
peculiar needs, without being compelled to wait the pleasure 
of a state legislature. I recommend immediate legislation 
giving the cities of Kansas home rule, empowering them to 
adopt the city manager plan of government at the ensuing 
or any April election ; such law to be fully guarded against 
conflict with stnte laws and interference by the cities with 
the police powers of the state. 

The city manager plan is a great forward step in the 
direction of better government, and everywhere where it is 
in operation is producing striking results in the way of 
economies and better service. 

Reform in Receiverships. 
The recent scandal caused by the payment of enormous 
and exorbitant receivers' and attorneys' fees in the case of 
a baidtrupt natural gas company impels me to urge you to 
enact a law placing in the hands of the public utilities com- 
mission the business of all bankrupt public service com- 
panies ; the commission to appoint the receiver and to have 
genera] supervision of the business, in the same manner as 
the bank commissioner now handles the business of an in- 
solvent state bank. The fees of the receiver and the attor- 
neys employed should be limited by law to a sum in keeping 



THE STATE LEVY 251 

with those paid in the ordinary conduct of business. Such 
a measure will put an end to a form of graft, that has be- 
come a public stench. Every dollar squandered or grafted 
in such receivership cases finally is paid by the public, and 
the people are looking to this legislature for the righting of 
this ancient wrong. 

Revenue and Expenditures. 

Kansas, in common with the other states of the Union, is 
disturbed by the rapid increase in taxes affecting every 
citizen. The solution of this problem should be the first 
concern of all who are entrusted with raising and expend- 
ing public funds. The functions of government have so in- 
creased ; the cost of all commodities used by the state, in- 
cluding labor, has so advanced, that greater revenues 
are imperative. Consequently increased taxes cannot be 
avoided. Instead of excusing carelessness or extravagance, 
this calls for greater care and economy and more scrupulous 
honesty in the spending of every cent of the people 's money. 

As indicating the rapidly growing burden of taxation, I 
beg to direct your attention to the increase from year to 
year since 1912 in the total taxes levied in Kansas: 

Increase in taxes of 1013 over 1912 $1,677,277 

Increase in taxes of 1914 over 1913 1.504.239 

Increase in taxes of lOlji over 1914 2.861,445 

Increase in taxes of 1916 over 1915 1,938,965 

Total increase in four years $7,981,926 

The taxes of 1912 totaled $27,806,606. Therefore, the 
increase in the last four years has been 28.7 per cent. 

The increase last year over the year previous was as fol- 
lows : For state government, 7 per cent ; for counties, 21 
per cent ; for cities, 16 per cent ; for townships, 19 per cent ; 
for school districts, 10 per cent. 

The state tax levy in Kansas is $1.30 per $1,000, with few 
exceptions a rate lower than other states. That you may 
know how this $1.30 is expended let me say that 57 cents of 
it goes to the support of the state educational institutions; 



252 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

27 cents to the charitable institutions ; 13 cents for prisons 
and reformatories; 5 cents for homes of soldiers and their 
widows ; and 28 cents for the maintenance of all other state 
officials, institutions and departments, including the su- 
preme and the district courts, the state printing plant and 
the legislature. The st.ite all told receives on an average 
about one-tenth of the total funds raised for all purposes. 
For the year 1916, the taxes reported by the county clerks 
in all of the counties aggregated $85,788,531.96, an increase 
of nearly 2 million dollars. The total cost of the state gov- 
ernment in 1916 was $5,484,712. The principal expendi- 
tures were: 

Educational institutions $2,170 80.'>,.83 

Charitable institutions 010.(573.03 

Penal institutions 077,301.09 

Soldiers' homes 142.111.84 

It is plainly evident that any genuine attempt at re- 
trenchment in public expense cannot begin and end in 
economy in the stite's business alone. Should you eliminate 
entirely the expense of state government and all the state 
institutions, you would reduce the taxpaj^er's burden only 
10 per cent. It is for this reason that the demand grows 
for greater simplicity and economy in the forms of local 
government — the places where 90 per cent of the taxes is 
expended. 

But this does not give the state license for extravagance. 
You must bear in mind that bnre maintenance is costing 
much more today than ever before ; the high cost of living is 
no respecter of state institutions. The state property must 
be kept in repair; there is no economy in letting it run 
down and deteriorate. The high price of labor and material 
may prevent erecting some greatly desired additions, but 
should nrtt interfere with providing for actual needs. Our 
state institutions must not be permitted to retrograde. 

The Tax-Dodging Evil. 
In this connection, I Avish to call your attention to the 
unequal distribution of the burden of taxation, due to the 



HANDLING TAX DODGERS 253 

failure of citizens to report moneys and other intangibles 
for tax.ition. The increasing burden of taxation is not 
equally distributed. . It is notorious that hundreds of mil- 
lions of dollars of personal property held in this state escape 
taxation altogether. Reputable, high-minded, public-spirited 
citizens, under the specious plea that "everybody is doing 
it," withhold from taxation moneys, bonds, securities and 
other intangibles, leaving the entire burden of taxation to 
fall upon the holders of real estate, improvements, corpora- 
tions, livestock, household "goods and other properties ex- 
posed to the view of the assessor — a condition unjust in 
itself and demoralizing to the people. 

The b:ink examiner's report shows on deposit in the 
banks of Kansas 300 million dollars ; the assessors last 
March were able to find only 60 million dollars cash on 
hand in the state. This discrepancy of 240 million dollars 
does not by any means represent all the intangible prop- 
erty which escapes taxation. It is but a small part of it. 
Probably a h:-lf billion dollars of personal property is not 
taxed. Thousands of chattel and real-estate mortgages are 
assigned in blank for the purpose of evading taxation. For 
taxation purposes the county records should be made prima 
facie evidence of ownership of the mortgage. The tax- 
dodging problem is worthy of your best attention. 

In connection with the subject of revenues, I again sug- 
gest that all fees collected by state departments and state 
institutions be turned into the general revenue fund of the 
state treasury. These fees last year amounted to $1,560,344, 
and while they were all accounted for, they should in good 
business practice have been turned into the general fund 
and appropriated to specific purposes by the legislature, 
instead of being expended at the discretion of state officials 
and superintendents of institutions. 

Again I urge a uniform sj^stem of accounting for the 
state, the counties and for the municipalities, with an an- 
nual audit of these accounts by the state accountant. 

I recommend the county clerk be required to take and 



254 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

keep an invoice of the county's assets, including all uncol- 
lected taxes, with an itemized statement and description of 
the property upon which it is a lien, including the name of 
the owner. Also to keep a public list of all taxes rebated, 
the descriptions of the property and the name of the owner, 
that tlie public may know how much of the taxes the county 
officials rebate and how much of the rebates are just. 

Extortionate Fees. 
I recommend also a general and searching inquiry into 
the matter of fees in both the state and local courts and in 
county offices. In partition suits in the district court and 
in the case of small estates in the probate court, it some- 
times happens that before final settlement the fees consume 
the greater part of the property involved. The administra- 
tion of justice should not be allowed to bring hardship upon 
the people, and I hope this legislature will carefully revise 
the whole fee system. 

More Practical Schools. 
The last session enacted commendable legislation in the 
interest of rural schools. It greatly strengthened our school 
system. Here we are making progress. During the last 
two years more money was spent for school buildings and 
school improvements than during any similar period in our 
history. We now have 29 million dollars invested in com- 
mon-school property, and last year spent 13 million dollars 
for educational purposes. But we should not be satisfied, 
e\*en with that showing. Kansas is a progressive, forward- 
looking state, and it is especially important and necessary 
that we sliall not fail in any particular in our efforts to give 
the 400,000 scliool children of Kansas the best possible edu- 
cational opportunities. I consider vocational training of es- 
pecial importance. To that end I ask this legislature to give 
especial attention to the common schools, that every boy and 
girl in the state may have the opportunity to acquire a com- 
plete, practical education that will give him an equal chance 
in the world. The work of standardizing schools should be 



BETTER RURAL SCHOOLS URGED 255 

carried still further. Ampler provision should be made for 
rural high schools of the practical sort, and tuition in all 
high schools should be made free for every child in the 
state. We need better supervision of the schools and greater 
facilities for teaching agriculture, manual training and 
domestic science. In the interest of efficient citizenship, 
every Kansas youth should be fitted by your schools for the 
practical work of life. I urge a law be passed requiring the 
completion of the eighth grade by every Kansas child. 

Provision should be made whereby the school buildings, 
especially in the rural districts, may be more generally used 
for public purposes. They should be made real community 
centers. 

I urge that the office of state superintendent and of 
county superintendent be entirely removed from politics. 
I favor a county tax for rural schools instead of a district 
tax, so that all the schools of the county may be on a par 
as to equipment and efficiency. 

State Piiblication of Textbooks. 

The state publication of textbooks for use in the public 
schools has proved a success in Kansas and should be en- 
couraged and supported in every possible way. While we 
have not proceeded in this undertaking with speed — pre- 
ferring to demonstrate the feasibility of it as we went along 
— the state textbook commission has already affected a 
great saving to the people. This year one million books are 
being published at a saving of $100,000. The commission 
has demonstrated its ability to produce textbooks of high 
standard for less than they can be purchased elsewhere, and 
means should be provided as rapidly as possible to enable 
the commission to produce all the textbooks used in the 
public schools. 

I recommend that you enact a law providing for free 
textbooks in all the public schools, adopting a plan similar 
to that in Nebraska, the books to be the property of the 
district. 



256 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

Better Roads. 

Kansas must join other progressive states iu road im- 
provemeut. While the advent of the automobile has empha- 
sized our lack of good roads, the need of them existed before 
the motor car was invented. It is fundamental. Bad roadis 
shut our chief producers — our farmers — out of markets, and 
entail enormous expense in reaching them, at a time when 
prices are highest. Farmers in other states are reaping the 
benefit of their better roads, and iu competition with them 
our own farmers are seriously handicapped. The worst 
feature of this situation is that we are now spending enough 
money in a haphazard way to give Kansas much better 
roads if our system of building, maintaining and supervis- 
ing them was more business-like. The whole system of 
county and township management of roads should be re- 
vised and systematized. 

I am strongly opposed to more commissions, but to obtain 
this state's proportion of the federal appropriation for good 
roads, under the Shackelford act, it seems necessary that 
the legisLiture create a state highway commission or high- 
way commissioner to have general supervision of a system of 
state highways. This can be an honorary commission or can 
be composed in whole or in part of existing state officers. 

I recommend that prison camps be established wherever 
the highway commission can obtain the co-operation of 
(bounty aiitliorities, and that prisoners uow confined in 
county jails may be worked upon, county roads. Hundreds 
of prisoners are now committorl to county and city jails for 
minor offenses. Their confinement in idleness is an eco- 
nomic waste. "Worse than tlmt, it is demoralizing to char- 
acter and detrimental to health. These men should be put 
to work, and the greater part of the year could be utilized 
in making the improvements now so badly needed upon 
Kansas highways. 

The Prohibitory Laws. 
Prohibition prohibits in Kansas, the press agents of the 
booze-makers to the contrary, notwithstanding. No single 



ADVOCATES NATIONAL PROHIBITION 257 

law was ever enacted resulting in greater good to a com- 
monwealth than the prohibitory law of Kansas. Not only 
has it brought sobriety to our own people, but it has been a 
potent factor in hastening national prohibition. But until 
that day comes we need legislation to aid us in preventing 
the outlawed liquor interests from setting our laws at 
naught. You will recall that a bill introduced in the last 
legislature, making the, point of delivery in Kansas the 
place of sale of interstate shipments of liquor, was defeated 
by the Kansas City liquor interests. Clean out the lobby 
and pass such a measure at this session. The United 
States supreme court on the Webb-Kenyon law leaves no 
doubt as to the validity of such legislation. 

To strengthen further our prohibitory law, I ask for a 
law empowering the governor to suspend from office, upon 
evidence, any county attorney, mayor, police official or 
other officer charged with the law enforcement, who fails 
to perform his duty in compliance with his oath of office. 

I also ask that in cases of infraction of the prohibitory 
laws, city attorneys be given inquisitorial powers, as the 
county attorneys and attorney-general of the state now have. 

I further recommend that Kansas newspapers and peri- 
odicals be prohibited from publishing liquor advertisements 
and the advertisements of liquor dealers and manufac- 
turers, and that the sale and the display for sale by news- 
dealers and others of all publications carrying such adver- 
tisements be likewise prohibited. 

I ask this legislature to adopt a memorial petitioning the 
Congress of the United States to submit to the people of the 
nation at the earliest possible date, an amendment to the 
federal constitution prohibiting the manufacture, sale and 
importation of alcoholic beverages ; and in the meantime to 
enact federal laws which will aid and assist states having 
prohibitory laws to enforce them. 

The High Cost of Living. 
The increasing cost of living has become an almost un- 
bearable burden upon the people. It would be well for this 



258 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

legishitui'e to investigate the meat packers' trust, the cream- 
ery and cold-storage business, and all trade conditions in 
Kansas which give rise to suspicion of combinations or 
manipulation. There is general recognition by all econo- 
mists of the abnormal difference between the prices received 
by producers and the price paid by the ultimate consumer, 
the result of which is small profits for the farmer and ex- 
orbitant prices for the people. As a remedy for this evil, 
better organization and better methods of marketing are 
urgently needed. Kansas should encourage, by the neces- 
sary laws, the forming of farmer co-operative marketing 
societies. The state department of agriculture should be 
empowered to undertake and promote this important work. 

Industrial Development. 

The manufactured products of Kansas last year equaled 
in value the j)i'oducts of our farms, exclusive of livestock. 
But they are confined to a few restricted lines, and the 
state presents the anomaly of shipping hundreds of car- 
loads of its raw materials hundreds of miles to be converted 
into finished joroducts and shipped back to us at greatly 
enhanced prices. Kansas must develop industrially ; we 
need home markets; we need the growth and expansion 
which come with thriving little toA\Tis and cities in which 
men and women are employed the year round. I recom- 
mend that the functions of the state department of labor 
and industry be enlarged to embrace activities promoting 
the industrial development of the state, including the gath- 
ering of industrial statistics and other information which 
will enable manufacturers to appreciate the advantages of 
Kansas as a manufacturing field. 

State Oil Department, 
The oil and gas industry is developing rapidly in Kan- 
sas. The state oil department should be made of real use in 
its encouragement and aid. It should bear the same rela- 
tion to the industry in its charge that the department of 
agriculture bears to agriculture or the banking department 



STATE FLOOD ENGINEER NEEDED 259 

to the business of banking. It should compile statistics and 
obtain complete information concerning the industry in 
Kansas and its possibilities of further development. The 
department should be empowered to conserve the state's 
supply of oil and gas, preventing the deplorable v^astes that 
now characterize the industry. It should fix standard 
grades of kerosene and gasoline and a standard of measure- 
ment for natural gas. The expense of maintaining the de- 
partment should be borne by the industries affected. A 
new law providing for reasonable inspection fees will be 
necessary. 

Flood Prevention. 

Following the devastating floods of two years ago, when, 
property valued at millions of dollars was destroyed in 
Kansas, I called a conference of public officials, represen- 
tatives of big business interests and other interested citi- 
zens, at which ways and means for flood prevention were 
discussed. It was the sense of this conference that the 
project was so stupendous that it could be handled success- 
fully only by the state and federal governments working in 
co-operation. When the matter was brought to the atten- 
tion of Congress an appropriation was made to defray the 
expenses of a preliminary investigation, which is now in 
progress under the direction of the engineering corps of 
the United States army. I suggest that the legislature, 
through a concurrent resolution, commend the action of the 
federal government and memorialize Congress to make such 
additional appropriations as may be necessary to protect 
the state from flood losses in future. In order that the state 
and federal governments may co-operate more easily in the 
flood prevention work, I suggest that the state drainage 
engineer at the agricultural college be designated also as 
state flood engineer. 

Making State Institutions Productive. 

The purpose of our state institutions is public service — 
not the producing of revenue. But this purpose is in no 



260 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

way incompatible with the exercise of economy and a little 
business sense in the conduct of these institutions. The 
more nearly our penal and charitable institutions are made 
self-supporting without impairment of their efficiency the 
better it is for the state and the state's wards. The state 
maintains a large farm at each of its charitable and penal 
institutions, which falls short of its maximum production. 
I recommend that effort be made to produce upon these 
farms as large a part as possible of the supplies used by the 
state institutions. Dairy herds and poultry flocks should 
be increased, and canneries may be established at several of 
the institutions with profit to the state ; each institution 
producing that product for which it is best adapted and 
selling it to the others on a cash basis, thereby getting full 
credit for what it produces. 

The state has in the past been singularly lax in its system 
of bookkeeping. For example, the state penitentiary annu- 
ally supplies thousands of dollars' worth of coal to other 
state institutions without expense to them. As a result, no 
one has any idea of the relative cost of maintenance. 

Prisons and Care of Prisoners. 

Two years ago I directed the legislature's attention to the 
dilapidated condition of the greater part of the state peni- 
tentiary at Lansing. Two years' hard usage has not im- 
proved this condition. An immediate start at rebuilding 
the prison should be made. A moderate appropriation 
would enable the warden, by using prison labor and ma- 
terial, to rebuild on a modern plan the big cell houses, now 
unsanitary, out-of-date and a reproach to the state. I 
recommend that this appropriation be made. 

I also urge that a careful survey be made of the entire 
penal system of the state that it may be made to conform 
more closely to modern ideas of penology. Further effort 
should be exerted to make our prisons and penitentiary 
really reformatory. 

A great number of the city and county jails of Kansas 
are a disgrace to the state. I heartily approve the Indus- 



WELFARE MEASURES SUGGESTED 261 

trial farm colony plan for care of jail prisoners. These 
men should be kept at work. 

Provision should be made for teaching every inmate of 
our prisons a useful trade so that he or she may have means 
of self-support upon leaving the institution. I urge, too, 
that provision be made whereby prisoners of the peniten- 
tiary may receive compensation for work done in excess of 
a reasonable requirement of work for their maintenance. 
This especially is desirable in case of prisoners with fami- 
lies depending upon them. Often these families suffer 
greater hardships than the prisoners themselves. But even 
the man without dependents will feel the incentive to in- 
dustry and good conduct if he is earning wages and ac- 
cumulating money with which he may make a new start in 
life upon his release. 

Human Welfare. 

The life, health and vigor of the men, women and chil- 
dren of the state are its greatest assets. It is certainly as 
much the duty of the state to promote the welfare of its 
citizens as to protect their lives and property. Kansas has 
been a leader in many phases of welfare legislation; but 
there is more we can do and must do. 

Among measures for general welfare, I especially recom- 
mend these : 

Only a few counties are observing the law for the pay- 
ment of a pension to worthy widowed mothers, as provided 
by the legislature two years ago. The law should be 
strengthened by requiring each county to provide funds for 
this purpose. 

Children who through the loss of parents or other mis- 
fortune become wards of the state or county must be given 
the greatest possible opportunity for development into 
Christian manhood and womanhood. The best public insti- 
tution never can equal or take the place of a home and 
home-training. I recommend that so far as possible private 
homes be found for children of the Orphans' Home. 



262 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

A state detention home for the care of delinquent women 
and girls over 17 should be established for the purpose of 
teaching such delinquents some respectable means of earn- 
ing a livelihood. Society gains nothing by their incarcera- 
tion if they are turned loose in a few weeks or months with 
no me. ins of self-support and helpless to cope with the world. 

To abate the loan-shark evil, cities of the first and second 
class should be authorized to establish municipal loan agen- 
cies. 

The child labor law should be amended to restrict fur- 
ther the age limit and hours of labor of children, especially 
in liazardous occupations. 

The laws governing the employment of women should 
make such provision for decency, comfort and health as 
should be given the mothers of the race. 

The activities of the state free employment bureau should 
be widened. 

The small debtors' court has enabled many persons of 
limited means in our larger cities to collect small debts 
witliout expensive litigation. These courts should be ex- 
tended to every county in the state. 

The workmen's compensation act should be amended, to 
reduce to the minimum the possibility and necessity of liti- 
gation in personal-injury cases, and a more liberal compen- 
sation be provided^for. The allowance in Kansas is below 
the average of other states having workmen's compensation 
a(3ts. 

Tlie mining laws should be revised and codified; inspec- 
tion should be extended to include supervision and inspec- 
tion of gypsum, salt, lead and zinc mines. Absolute sani- 
tary conditions should be maintained. The state mine- 
inspecting department should be given better facilities for 
its work, especially in first aid rescue equipment. I hope 
to see the legislature work out a plan that will give ample 
protection to families of miners who lose their lives in mine 
disasters. Legislation also should be passed making all 
scrip issued by mining companies, or other employers, re- 



THE MERIT SYSTEM 263 

deemable at its face value at the pay day following its 
issuance. 

The people of Kansas recognize the value and necessity 
of effective censorship of moving pictures. However, the 
present manner of censorship and appeal has not proved 
satisfactory, and has been a source of great annoyance to 
the appeal board, illogically composed of the governor, the 
secretary of state and the attorney-general. It is ridiculous 
that these three busy officials should be called upon daily 
to drop the important Avork of the state in order to pass 
upon the pictured antics of a buffoon or the hair-raising 
episodes of a blood-and-thunder story. I recommend this 
provision of the law be changed. 

Three-Fourths Jury Verdict. 
I recommend an amendment to the constitution to pro- 
vide for a verdict in civil cases by three-fourths of the mem- 
bers of a jury. 

The Civil Service. 
The state of Kansas must take no backward step in its 
merit system. Politics has absolutely been eliminated from 
the state institutions. In the last two years your governor 
hns not asked nor suggested a single change at any institu- 
tion for political reasons. Ability, efficiency and integrity 
have been the only requirements for holding a public place. 
The people do not want to see the state institutions again 
made the playthings of politics. Of the 2,663 state em- 
ployes, 40 per cent, or 1,021, are now under the civil service 
law, 1,648 being exempted by law. If any change is made 
in the present civil service law, the change should be to 
strengthen it and make infractions of it less easy. The 
public business of the state must be divorced absolutely 
from partisan politics. 

The Primary Law. 
The people of Kansas look with favor upon the Kansas 
primary election law. Some minor changes doubtless are 



264 SECOND LEGISLATIVE MESSAGE 

needed, but any effort to repeal it will meet with general 
disapproval. The popular primary election has come to 
stay. 

Abolish the State School of Mines. 

I recommend abolishing the state school of mines at Weir 
City. This school, established in 1912, has cost the state 
$50,000. The average enrollment during five years has 
been less than 18, with no graduates. The enrollment in 
September of this year was four. The school has met no 
demand of the people, it fills no need, and should be imme- 
diately abolished. 

The State House and Grounds. 

Strangers judge a state, as well as an individual, by the 
condition in which it keeps its home and front yard. Kan- 
sas cannot be proud of the dilapidated condition of the east 
wing of the state house and the slovenly-kept state house 
grounds. I suggest an ample appropriation for restoring 
the east wing and for beautifying and keeping the grounds. 

Report Appropriation Bills Promptly. 

I especially urge that the ways and means committee of 
eacli house report the appropriation bills early in the ses- 
sion, tliat they may be given the careful consideration they 
require. 

I heartily commend the action of the senate and house in 
reducing the number of employes, thus increasing the effi- 
ciency of the service and making a saving in the expendi- 
ture of the public funds which will be generally approved 
by the people. 

A Great Chance to Help Kansas. 

In conclusion, I desire to congratulate you, gentlemen of 
the legislature of 1917, upon the opportunity you have of 
rendering a real service to the people of this great state. 
Kansas was never so ready for a constructive program. 
Our people realize, as never before, that with all our high 



A CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRAM NEEDED 265 

ideals and all our good intentions we somehow have failed 
to reach high efficiency in governing ourselves. We are 
pretty well convinced the fault is not in our intent, but in 
the machinery we have been using. The people are looking 
to you to remedy that fault. It is a big job, but one to 
which you are equal. No political expedient demands dodg- 
ing or trimming or hedging on your part; no bitter par- 
tisanship exists to excuse pettifogging at this session. I 
appeal to you as men, as Kansans, as statesmen, as patriots, 
to put aside minor matters ; to eliminate politics and parti- 
sanship ; to get together and do the big things required and 
expected of you. I ask you to consider throughout your 
deliberations, first, last, solely — the interest and the welfare 
of all the people of Kansas whose public servants you are. 
And I have every confidence that you will — that you will 
earn the praise of the people and the approval of your 
conscience. Respectfully submitted, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



A SPECIAL MESSAGE ON APPROPRIATIONS. 

Governor Capper to the Legislature in Session in Topeka, 
February 23, 1915. 

To the Members of the Legislature: 

We have a plain duty before us, one we must not shirk, 
one not to be avoided nor evaded. It compels me to direct 
your attention to a matter instantly important and press- 
ingly urgent, if as chosen ministers of the will of the people 
of Kansas we are to do our duty as public servants and keep 
faith with those we represent and have sworn to serve. 

In Kansas we are facing an absolute necessity for strin- 
gent economy. In providing for the needs of the various 
state institutions, it is a case of doing the best we can at a 
time of world-wide uncertainty and depression, a time when 
prudence and common sense counsel the utmost moderation, 



266 A MESSAGE ON APPROPRIATIONS 

if not the most painstaking retrenchment. It is a case of 
cutting our garment to fit our cloth. 

A niggardly policy of dealing with public affairs is not 
expected nor demanded of us. To impair the usefulness of 
any state institution or retard its growth is not economizing. 
The consequences of such a policy would be as deplorable 
as to over-extend our expenditures at a time when economy 
of the strictest sort is enforced on every prudent person by 
the prevailing conditions, and when the burdens of taxation 
are sufficiently heavy. It is for us to steer most carefully 
between these extremes, and if we do not we may expect 
most sharply and most justly to be called to account. We 
can justify ourselves only here and now. 

The appropriation bills originating in the Senate and al- 
ready agreed to by the Senate or its Ways and Means Com- 
mittee, I am informed, aggregate $7,214,650. This is an in- 
crease of $1,521,107.34 over the appropriations made by the 
legislature of 1913 for the same purposes. It is $1,035,070 
in excess of the sum called for by corresponding bills in the 
House. The appropriations recommended by the House 
committee are in excess of the estimates made by the auditor 
of state after careful investigation of the needs of the vari- 
ous departments of state government, and, I understand, 
are based upon a most careful and searching analysis of 
what the Ways and Means Committee of the House are con- 
vinced are amply sufficient. The members of this commit- 
tee have given full consideration to the pressing demands 
of every institution affected. I am fully convinced that the 
appropriations proposed by the House committee should not 
be increased. 

The appropriations asked for by those intrusted with the 
conduct of these institutions are asked for in good faith. In 
most cases they could be used to advantage. But we must 
not forgot tliat the assessed valuation of property in Kansas 
was decreased by 5 million dollars last year, nor that the 
loss of revenue by the repeal of the inheritance tax law and 
other measures will amount to several hundred thousand 



AN INTERESTING COMPARISON 267 

dollars. The chairman of the State Tax Commission has 
warned us that unless this legislature decreases appropria- 
tions by at least a half million dollars, the state tax levy 
must be increased for the first time in four years. The 
Senate appropriations, if passed, will necessitate an increase 
of the levy by % mill, an extraordinary increase. I do not 
believe such an increase is now justifiable, nor that the 
people of Kansas will sanction it, and they cannot be ac- 
cused of niggardliness nor the lack of liberality in public 
affairs. 

A comparison of the appropriations made by the state 
legislature 12 years ago with the appropriations now pro- 
posed by the Senate for 1915 shows an increase of 91 per 
cent. Our state expenditures would then be nearly doubled, 
with a very slight increase in population. The appropria- 
tions made by the state legislature during the last six ses- 
sions are : 

1903 $5,477,040.97 

1905 5,615,127.45 

1907 6,734.927.55 

1909 7,386.578.04 

1911 8,375.884.01 

1913 8,923,919.43 

The increase under consideration by the legislature of 
1915, and already approved by the Senate, will bring this 
session's appropriations up to the astonishing sum of ap- 
proximately $10,445,000 — not only the greatest appropria- 
tion ever made by any Kansas legislature, but the greatest 
increase ever made by any legislature in the history of the 
state. 

I do not question the motives of those who now advocate 
this abnormal increase in appropriations, but the fact re- 
mains that some of the members who are now urging this 
increase are the very ones who were most deeply concerned 
two years ago in keeping down appropriations. Then they 
reluctantly appropriated $166,982 for new buildings at 
state educational institutions, while now they are urgently 
insisting that $960,350 be appropriated for the same pur- 



268 A MESSAGE ON APPROPRIATIONS 

pose. And all this in face of the fact that our assessed 
valuation actually decreased 5 million dollars last year, 
that our population has not increased, and that business 
conditions, which were then satisfactory, are now much less 
favorable. Our farmers face uncertain and unstable mar- 
kets, an unusual number of laboring men are out of employ- 
ment and business conditions are far from satisfactory. All 
individuals are curtailing expenses. The state cannot af- 
ford unnecessarily to increase them. We should not impose 
this additional burden upon the people. 

I urgently ask a reconsideration of the appropriation 
bills ; for the elimination of every item calling for an expen- 
diture which can by any possibility wait for more propitious 
times. I have studiously refrained from any attempt to 
encroach upon the functions of the legislative branch of our 
state government, but I cannot and will not approve expen- 
ditures which I believe to be unwise and unnecessary and 
extravagant at such a time as this. I most earnestly appeal 
to you to lay aside the particular benefit of any section of 
the state or of any institution of the state in which you have 
a special interest. In the light of conditions as they are, 
and not as we would have them, I urge you to consider 
solely the good of the state as a whole ; the best interests of 
all its people. Respectfully submitted, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



AN APPEAL FOR A SINGLE STATE ADMINIS- 
TRATIVE BOARD. 

Governor Capper's Special Message to the State Senate 
Urging . the Creation of a Board of Administration to 
Conduct the Affairs of All the State Institutions, Feb- 
ruary 21, 1917. 

Gentlemen of the Senate : 

A measure of the greatest importance to the state is now 
before you — having passed the house, and one in which I, 



A WASTEFUL SYSTEM 269 

as governor, feel the deepest interest. It provides for the 
consolidation of the three large state administrative boards 
into a single board of four members, and for the election by 
this board of a business manager of the educational, char- 
itable and penal institutions under its supervision. 

This proposal has been very widely discussed and most 
favorably received by the people of Kansas. I gave par- 
ticular attention to it during the late political campaign in 
all parts of the state, and everywhere was assured of the 
approval by business interests of the plan. 

The measure has been carefully drawn. I am satisfied 
that with a single board and an efficient business manager, 
we can effect important economies, both in purchases of 
supplies, aggregating hundreds of thousands of dollars an- 
nually, for the state institutions, and in unifying the insti- 
tutional management. 

The plan follows closely the commission-manager plan of 
administration, which has worked so admirably in every 
city that has adopted it and is rapidly spreading over the 
country, and is based on the form of organization and man- 
agement of the successful corporations. 

The proposed board of administration, composed of four 
of the most competent business men to be obtained in the 
state, under this bill, will have general supervision over the 
institutions and will be advisory to the business manager, 
who will have the duties that ordinarily belong to an officer 
of that title in private business organizations. He will 
have oversight of the institutions, will prepare their bud- 
gets, with the assistance of the board of administration and 
heads of institutions, will audit and look after their busi- 
ness and, as the general purchasing agent, will bring busi- 
ness system into the purchases of supplies. 

This bill, of which I have reviewed only the main pro- 
visions and purposes, has passed the house after a thoro 
discussion, that entered into every detail. The house has 
shown its earnest desire to co-operate in effecting so im- 
portant an advance in the business management of our 



270 A MESSAGE ON APPROPRIATIONS 

great and fast growing institutions. My own interest in it 
is such that if this bill receives your approval, I hope to see 
the institutions managed with much greater satisfaction 
than heretofore and with important economies. 

If taxes are to- cease growing by leaps and bounds, red 
tape and waste must be cut out. The legislatures in a 
dozen states, notably Illinois, Indiana and Vermont, are 
working this winter along the lines suggested in this bill. 

The tendency towards multitudinous and overlapping 
commissions and boards is one of the weaknesses of modern 
governmental machinery. There is not a great business in 
the state that would give a moment's consideration to a 
proposition to abandon existing business methods and sys- 
tems of management and adopt the political system that 
prevails in Kansas or any other state government. 

The state accountant estimates this bill will save Kansas 
$300,000 every year in salaries and operating expenses. It 
begins by cutting off eight of the fattest, high-salaried 
political jobs in the state. Naturally, these office seekers, 
the clerks under them, and their friends, are opposing the 
bill. Its passage will absolutely cut out politics in the 
management of state institutions. It means those institu- 
tions will be operated in the best manner at the least cost ; 
that waste, mismanagement, favoritism and expensive 
blundering or neglect will be minimized, as they are now in 
every big business. 

In view of the evident economies such a system will ef- 
fect, I believe I correctly voice public opinion in expressing 
the earnest hope that the senate will join with the house 
in giving the state this much needed legislation. 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



MESSAGE VETOING BILL REPEALING MASSA- 
CHUSETTS BALLOT LAW. 

Governor Capper in a Veto Message, March 10, 1917, Saved 
the Law Permitting Independent Voting in Kansas. 

To the House of Representatives : 

I regret having to return house bill No. 515 without my 
approval. I am sensible that many of my party associates 
in the legislature will be disappointed with my veto of this 
bill. 

For years, from conviction, I have been an advocate of 
the Massachusetts ballot. I have listened attentively to all 
that has been said in support of the repeal bill, and regret 
that it is necessary for me to differ so radically in regard 
to it with many of my associates, whose opinions I value 
and respect. But my faith in the superiority of the Massa- 
chusetts ballot is unshaken, and my conviction in regard to 
the undesirability of the repeal measure has not changed. 

Objections to this measure have come to me voluntarily 
from all parts of the state, and from all classes and condi- 
tions of men and women. And I find myself in entire 
agreement with the views of the objectors. It is my opinion 
that Kansas voters generally would deeply resent the enact- 
ment of this bill into law. The people are not asking for a 
return to the party circle form of ballot, in whatever form 
presented. They object to frequent tinkering with the 
ballot. 

Personally it is my firm and sincere conviction that a 
form of ballot which compels less discrimination in the 
choice of candidates instead of more, is not conducive to 
good citizenship, nor to good government and good politics. 
Party organization and party strength we must have. But 
party health is even more vital. Voting a ticket blind at 
elections can hardly be said to promote party health. It 

271 



272 A MESSAGE ON BALLOT LAW 

canuot build up a virile Republicanism, nor a stronger and 
better democracy. We shall best serve our party by best 
serving our state. 

It has been demonstrated that there are fewer opportuni- 
ties for mistakes in voting the Massachusetts ballot than 
there were under the old form of straight-party tickets. 
Notwithstanding the great and increasing length of tickets, 
the number of spoiled ballots has been reduced to a mini- 
mum. It is to be remembered that four years ago the gov- 
ernorship turned upon several thousand defective ballots 
spoiled by reason of straight-ticket complications. Had the 
Massachusetts ballot been in use at that time the election 
would never have been in doubt. 

The proposed ballot to which house bill 515 would return 
is complicated. It is a mixture. Half is under the straight- 
ticket form, and half is left under the present form. It 
promotes confusion. 

Besides its simplicity, the great merit of the Massachu- 
setts ballot is that it encourages intelligent, discriminating 
votiilg and stimulates greater interest in public affairs on 
the part of the voters. 

The party circle ballot encourages careless, indifferent, 
thoughtless voting. One cross on the ballot and the voter's 
duty to the state is discharged. 

The Massachusetts ballot is a step in advance in safe- 
guarding the secrecy of the ballot. When all that is re- 
quired is the placing of a cross in the circle, the precinct 
watcher has a ready check on the voter in the time he takes 
to mark his ballot in the booth. 

I am advised that 19 states have the Massachusetts ballot 
as now used in Kansas. 

It is a curious fact that only one state has the ballot pre- 
scribed in house bill 515. That state is Nebraska, and I am 
informed a bill is pending in the legislature to repeal its 
ballot law, with good prospect of success. 

It has been pointed out to me that members of the oppos- 
ing party in this legislature have fought the repeal bill. 



NOT A PARTY QUESTION 273 

I claim to be as loyal as any man to the best interests of 
my party. I do not think that house bill 515 is in the true 
interest of the party. It even involves a reflection, it seems 
to me, on the party's intelligence. However this may be, 
the legislature and the governor are not sent here to devise 
legislation to give one party an advantage in elections thru 
a form of ballot. The party's claim upon the voters is 
rightly based on the service it gives them, the character of 
its principles, the things it stands for, the character and 
fitness of the men it nominates and the men it elects to 
public office. 

We need the ballot that discriminates, and we should en- 
courage the discriminating voter. 

Respectfully submitted, 

ARTHUR CAPPER, Governor. 



Governor Capper's Addresses 



ON 



Kansas and Kansas Ideals 

Politics and Good Government 

Prohibition 

Education 

Farming and Farmer's Problems 

Church and Public Welfare 

Business 



KANSAS 

The first native governor of Kansas, Arthur Capper, 
ever has been ready to defend her against the assaults of 
enemies, such as the liquor interests, which have uttered 
many a foul libel against the state, and to champion her 
and her interests in the public forum. Many of his most 
striking phrases, his most ardent utterances, concern Kan- 
sas and Kansas people. In the following excerpts from his 
speeches and other public addresses and proclamations his 
love and loyalty to the state of his nativity are reflected. 



A NATIVE SON'S TRIBUTE TO HIS STATE 

From an Address at the Panama-Pacific Exposition^ San 
Francisco, Dedication of Kansas Building, July 19, 1915. 

I am happy to be the bearer of a message of congratula- 
tion and good will from the people of the state of Kansas 
to California and to the management of this great inter- 
national exposition. There is a close bond of sympathy 
between Kansas and California. Our people have much in 
common. I think this is due, in part at least, to the fact 
that this beautiful Golden state, with its wonderful climate, 
its bounteous gifts of nature and, most of all, its open- 
handed, cordial, hospitable people, has tempted so many 
good and true Kansans to leave the Jayhawker state and 
retire to California to spend their good Kansas dollars. 
"We have sent you also, I am told, some of your best and 

277 



278 KANSAS AND KANSAS IDEALS 

most successful real estate agents. I believe California has 
enticed away more good Kansas people than any other state 
in the Union. I warn you, however, that we are trying to 
make Kansas such a good state, with a people so prosperous 
and so happy, that our wandering sons and daughters can- 
not resist "the call of Kansas," but will come back to "that 
parallelogram of plenty" we all love so well. 

This Wonderland of Beauty in which we stand, where 
all the arts combine to raise, as tho by magic, com- 
memorative temples to art, to science, to invention, to in- 
dustry, to education, to religion, to all that contributes to 
the well-being of mankind — 

This marvelous displaj' of the beautiful brought together 
from the treasure houses of all lands — 

This broad and comprehensive exposition of the means 
of progress which have brought our people and the peoples 
of the world to their present state of civilization, and which 
we believe God in His providence is using to bring us to 
man's ultimate goal — 

This stupendous panorama of mankind in the Twentieth 
Century, gathered together while so large a part of the 
civilized world is plunged into the chaotic barbarism of war, 
is, first of all, an everlasting monument to the indomitable 
will, the courage, the energy, the resourcefulness, the spirit 
of the people of California. 

We are an agricultural state and our contributions to 
your fair must necessarily consist largely of the products 
of our fields. Of these, we have sent you our best, and 
you and your judges have been duly appreciative. 

I presume that the greater part of you who are within 
the sound of my voice are now or have been at some time 
in your life, Kansans. I may be pardoned, then, I hope, 
if I say something here about the state and the people I 
am so prond to serve as executive. I know that we Kansas 
people have ])een accused of being unable to talk about any- 
thing else. We have been accused of "blowing our own 
horn" to excess. They say wq are much given to hot air 



MANY WONDERFUL ACHIEVEMENTS 279 

and statistics. However, you and I know better. We know 
the half has not been told of Kansas, nor ever can be. 

Never before have Kansans so fully realized what a 
blessed privilege it is to live in happy, prosperous Kansas. 
While war is desolating Europe, destroying life, wrecking 
nations and paralyzing progress — everywhere in peaceful 
Kansas we are producing record-breaking crops, encourag- 
ing united community interest and effort, developing a 
quickened civic conscience and a higher social life, making 
our cities and towns better places in which to live, building 
more consolidated school houses, more high schools, more 
community halls and churches, more libraries for town and 
country folk, more comfortable homes all over our broad 
prairies, and more miles of good roads and substantial and 
handsome bridges. All Kansas is reading, thinking, doing ; 
seeing, hoping, testing; believing, trying, accomplishing. 
Everywhere within the state a great page in the history 
of Kansas progress is being written by ambitious, forward- 
looking Kansans. 

Not long ago, I was honored by a visit in my office at 
the state house from a sweet-faced, gray-haired lady who 
came to tell me how glad she was that she had lived long 
enough to be able to greet a native Kansan governor. In 
the course of our conversation it came out that this good 
woman had lived for more than sixty years on the same 
Kansas farm. When she came to Kansas with her parents, 
as a child, the entire white population of what was then 
the Territory of Kansas was less than one hundred persons. 
Their only neighbors were Indians; the occasional visit of 
a trapper or a hunter was an event long to be remembered. 

This white-haired gentlewoman — Mrs. Mary Stimson — at 
84 benign and sweet, clear and keen of mind, well-informed, 
with f :ith in God and humanity strengthened by her simple 
and her noble life, has seen within this brief span in the 
unending reckoning of time, such things come to pass in a 
wilderness, as time or history has never before within one 
lifetime given to mortal eye to behold. ' She has seen the 



280 KANSAS AND KANSAS IDEALS 

passing of the Indian and the buffalo from our plains, the 
banisliing of slavery from Kansas and the nation, a terrible 
border war as well as a civil war, the so-called "American 
Desert" converted into cattle ranges and these great tracts 
of grazing land cut up into fertile farms. In the brief span 
of a lifetime — a lifetime still unended — she has seen a 
great empire spring from a vast solitude, a wild West give 
place to a new and a cultured modern civilization, a great 
commonwealth of the nation grow from less than 100 souls 
to more than 1% millions. 

On what other part of the globe, at what other period in 
history since time began has there been such a wide range 
of achievement, such a magnificent sweep of accomplish- 
ment? Kansas is the world's greatest epic! There is noth- 
ing, even in romance, to compare with its rise, development 
and history. It is a record that stirs the blood and makes 
pardonable a pride, however great, in being a Kansan. 

Nearly half a century ago William H. Seward said that 
in the future "men will go up to Kansas as they go to 
Jerusalem, ' ' 

Already the prophecy has been justified. 

There is an irresistible magnetism, a mental tonic, in the 
atmospliere of Kansas. The history, the growth, the pros- 
perity of the state, are all exceptional. Tho little more 
than fifty years old, Kansas has outstripped in population, 
wealth and all the elements of an advanced civilization, 
more than two-thirds of the states of the Union. 

It is the heart of the continent. Its development has 
been without parallel in the record of American common- 
wealths. It has absorbed in its population the best blood 
and brain of all the civilized nations of the earth. Every- 
where we look the state shows steady advancement; every- 
where are the evidences of culture, thrift and enterprise, 
of a larger, broader life, and a firmer, deeper faith. 

Let me say here that I yield to no man in my love for 
my stnte. Kansas is my birthplace. Born fifty years ago 
only a few miles from John Brown's historic cabin at Osa- 



WHAT KANSAS STANDS FOR 281 

watomie I was taught from my cradle, to love my state and 
defend it, and all I have or hope to have is in Kansas. 

It was the admission of California as a free state that 
gave the free states a majority in the Senate, and it was 
the settlement in Kansas of many of your hardy pioneers — 
the "forty-niners" — all sturdy champions of human free- 
dom and national unity, that helped us found and develop 
in Kansas what I believe is the finest example in all Amer- 
ica, or in all the world, of a pure democracy responsive to 
the will of the people and standing firmly for the rights 
of all men without regard to race, creed or color. 

In our own way, I think we have done more in Kansas 
to promote social progress, to bring larger opportunities 
to our citizens of every class and condition, than any other 
American commonwealth ; and have developed an intelli- 
gent citizenship thru the ballot which comes nearer to 
putting government on the basis intended by the framers 
of the Declaration of Independence, than is to be found 
anywhere else in all the land, or in all the world. 

In the comparatively short time since the plowshare first 
turned the rich and fertile sod of Kansas, the vigorous 
young state has stepped forward with all the impetuosity 
of youth, and now, as compared with her sister states ranks : 
First in wheat, first in combined value of wheat and corn, 
first in alfalfa, first in sorghums, first in her per capita 
wealth, first in the arts of the husbandman, first in whole- 
some environments for home building and first in the high 
order of her citizenship. 

I am not going to weary you with statistics. But I hope 
I may be pardoned if I ask: "Haven't we reason to be 
proud of Kansas?" 

California has invited us to come here — with all the rest 
of the world — and to ' ' put our best foot forward. ' ' I wish 
that I might, today, make a fitting exhibit of what Kansas 
really is and what Kansas stands for. Kansas — 

The state which sends more boys and girls to university, 



282 KANSAS AND KANSAS IDEALS 

college and public school, in proportion to population, and 
fewer men and women to prison and jail than any other 
state. 

The state which has the smallest number of persons who 
cannot read and write — less than 2 per cent of its popula- 
tion. 

The state which gives most lavishly to the needy, the un- 
fortunate and the delinquent, which distributes more than 
2 million dollars every year thru its hospitals, its asy- 
lums, its orphanages and other public and private charities. 

The state with fewer millionaires and fewer paupers than 
any other state — pre-eminently the state of the great com- 
mon people of whom Abraham Lincoln said that God must 
have loved them best because he made so many of them. 

The state which has the lowest percentage of crime, 
poverty, immorality, insanity, imbecility and drunkenness. 

The state which was first successfully and completely to 
wipe out the abominable saloon traffic. 

The state which for thirty-five years has not had a legal- 
ized s.'loon or brewery, and now has eighty-eight city and 
county jails that are empty, forty-seven poor farms and 
almshouses that are unoccupied, twenty-eight counties in 
which the criminal courts have not had a prosecution in 
more than a year. 

The state which was first to declare unanimously thru 
its legislature, its state officials and its entire delegation 
in Congress for nationwide prohibition — and national pro- 
hibition is coming in less than ten years, just as sure as 
the sun shines. 

The state which has the lowest death rate in the United 
States, only seven to the 1,000, a percentage constantly de- 
creasing, notwithstanding we have more motor cars in pro- 
portion to population than any state. 

The state which has the largest per capita of wealth — 
almost $2,500 for every man, woman and child within its 
borders. 

The state which holds the world's record as a producer 



A LEADER AMONG STATES 283 

of wheat — a single crop of 185 million bushels — exceeding 
in value twice over all the gold and silver mined in the 
United States and Alaska in an entire year, and enough to 
feed every family in the United States for at least twelve 
months. 

The state to which the jury of awards of your great in- 
ternational exposition, only the other day, awarded one 
grand i)rize and seventy-eight medals for the surpassing 
excellence of its agricultural exhibit. 

The one state which has more than a half million boys 
and girls who never saw an open saloon. 

The finest, cleanest, soberest, happiest, most prosperous 
commonwealth in this Union. 

This is the exhibit of Kansas I should like to make to 
the people of the world in your beautiful exposition, and 
I freely confess I am proud to be the chief executive of 
such a state ; and especially proud to be the first native 
Kansan to become its governor; the first to be chosen by 
the votes of Kansas women. It is an honor of which any 
man may be proud. 

We are told by the kings of finance in Wall Street that 

Kansas is today the most prosperous state in the Union. 

This is trne. We have 205 millions of surplus wealth piled 

in our banks and savings institutions. But better and 

nobler than all this material success is the high standard 

/ of citizenship, the fine spirit of justice and fairness that 

/ animates the soul of every true Kansan with a little more 

I fervor, I am sometimes tempted to think, than the citizen 

of any other state. 

The true greatness of Kansas, as of any state, lies in the 
moral fiber of its people. Kansas is a great state because 
it is populated by great-hearted men and women. The 
pioneers who won the wilderness for us were hardy men 
and women, strong of heart and great of soul — they laid 
the foundation for a great state. It was Kansas that led 
the way in the nation's great struggle for human freedom, 
and for more than a third of a century the Kansas con- 



284 KANSAS AND KANSAS IDEALS 

science has been in the forerank in almost every effort to 
elevate the moral, social and educational standards of the 
nation. In Kansas a genuine effort has been made to in- 
corporate in our body politic, fundamental moral ideas, 
aiid we liave endeavored to base our laws and our institu- 
tions upon the eternal truths that tend to righteousness. 

And I honestly believe that Kansas today comes a little 
nearer than any other state in the Union to giving every 
man, woman and child within its borders evenhandcd jus- 
tice, a square deal and an equal chance in every depart- 
ment of life. 

And tliis has been brought about by the character and 
stability of the Kansas people ; it is because our Kansas 
citizenship is made up of men and women dominated so 
largely by Christian ideals — right living, high thinking, 
decency, honesty, sobriety, industry and the noblest things 
of life. Their patriotism and their high ideals are reflected 
in our laws and our institutions. 



KANSAS' DEBT TO OTHERS 

From an Address of Welcome to the Members of the Asso- 
ciation of American Secretaries of State, Meeting in 
Topeka, 1917. 

We of Kansas have a just pride in our state. We like 
to believe and do believe that ours is, in many ways, the 
greatest state in the Union and that our people are the 
best that the sun of heaven shines upon. This pride in 
our state and our people is not all our own. The members 
of this association have a right to share this pride with 
us because practically every state in the Union has con- 
tri])utod of her very best people to our population and 
added to the grandeur and glory of the "Sunflower" state. 

In the early settlement of Kansas were many hardships, 
dangers and privations. The weakling and the mollycoddle 



PATRIOTISM OF EARLY SETTLERS 285 

had no place nor share in the stirring events that trans- 
pired within our borders in those times that tried men's 
souls. Only the strong and brave could endure the awful 
strife and carnage that prevailed during the dark days 
immediately preceding the Civil War when lawlessness 
reigned supreme and force was the only arbiter and when 
only the brave men your states sent into the new territory 
saved the day for liberty and freedom. There is no more 
sublime example of true patriotism in all the world's his- 
tory than was displayed by those early settlers of Kansas 
and practically all the older states have a right to a share 
of the glory achieved by those hardy pioneers. 

When the war was over these men who had fought so 
bravely for law and order and liberty were the first to 
cast off the habiliments of war and they immediately be- 
came leaders in a great industrial war for the conquering 
of a wilderness and the building in its stead a great state 
and a greater civilization. For many years the farmers 
of Kansas battled against conditions that at times seemed 
insurmountable and labored under circumstances the most 
trying and discouraging. Crop failures and grasshoppers, 
drouth and mortgages were enough to dishearten any but 
the staunchest and again only the strong and courageous 
were able to hold out. And be it remembered that in this 
later war of conquest of the elements all the states sent 
their industrial soldiers to our aid, the very best they had 
to offer, for only the enterprising and the courageous cared 
to enlist in this volunteer army or having enlisted only 
they had the nerve to stay to the finish. 

And so, my friends, our state was builded and populated 
by the strong, the virile, the courageous and the enter- 
prising from all the states. This is why Kansas claims so 
much for her citizenship. It is no idle claim. It is an 
example of the survival of the fittest and you have a right 
to share with us this feeling of pride because you con- 
tributed of the very best that you had to our wonderful 
achievements and success. 



KANSAS' RECOED OF ACHIEVEMENT 

From an Address at the G. A. B. Encampment at Hutch- 
inson, Kansas, May 12, 1915. 

Kansas has a sliining record of accomplishment in the 
field of successful, constructive legislation. Its prohibitory 
law, its "blue sky" law, its anti-pass law, its primary elec- 
tion law, its bank guaranty law, its pure food law and its 
state text book law are a tribute to the progressive spirit 
of the Kansas people. 

The most modern and most humane prison in the United 
States is in Kansas and is considered the world's best re- 
form school for bad bankers. 

In proportion to population, Kansas has more boys and 
girls in the public schools, more students in its colleges and 
universities, and fewer men and women in jail, than any 
other state in the Union. Only 2 per cent of its popula- 
tion is illiterate. 

Twenty-two counties out of a total of one hundred and 
five have not called a grand jury to try a criminal case 
in ten years. 

Sixty-five counties have no prisoners in the penitentiary. 

Fifty-three counties today have empty jails. 

Thirty-eight counties today have empty poor houses, and 
the entire number of paupers in the state falls short of 600. 

Eighty-seven counties have no insane. 

Fifty-four counties have no feeble minded. 

The state's death rate has dropped from 17 in 1,000 to 
7 in 1,000, altho the motor car per capita of Kansas is of 
the highest and is constantly increasing. 

And I believe all this is largely due to the fact that for 
more than thirty-five years, the open saloon has been an 

286 . 



A CLEAN MORAL RECORD 287 

outlaw in this state. Our physical development has not 
been stunted, our moral sense has not been blunted by in- 
toxicating liquors. 

Kansas is the one state in the Union where a half million 
boys and girls, young men and women, never have seen a 
saloon ; never have been brought face to face with the soul- 
destroying blight of alcohol. 

It is good to live in Kansas. 

It is good to be proud of such a state and such a record. 
But let us earnestly resolve that every day we live we shall 
endeavor with all the earnestness we possess to make Kan- 
sas greater, cleaner, happier, better, that we in our time 
may merit the honor and esteem of generations here and 
yet to come, and crown our lives with the ineffable satis- 
faction that comes of doing God's work. 



THE GREAT MEN OF KANSAS 

From an Address at the Wichita (Kansas) Exposition, 
Oct. 12, 1915. 

Recently during a fit of mental dyspepsia, a famous 
editorial writer in Kansas mournfully announced in his 
paper that Kansas had produced no great men. 

It is true we have been doing team work in Kansas rather 
than specializing. But team work was the important and 
the necessary thing. The world's history knows no greater 
epic in state-building than the rise in 50 years of the Kan- 
sas Empire, with its culture, wealth and progressive civil- 
ization, from the sage brush and the prairie. An empire, 
too, as large or larger than any one of a half dozen great 
kingdoms, which have considered one or more centuries not 
too long a time to take for the building of a single pyramid 
or the construction of one cathedral. 

We are pretty young yet to be counting our great men, 
but to charge that the pioneers of Kansas, those men and 



288 THE GREAT MEN OF KANSAS 

« 
women strong of heart and great of soul, who led the way 
in tlie great struggle for human freedom in the '60s, failed 
utterly to develop individual greatness, or to impress their 
own qualities on the succeeding generations, controverts 
all we know of science and history. 

In the Kansas language, "it isn't so." 

Early in its history Kansas developed one of the great- 
est constructive statesmen of his day — Preston B. Plumb. 

In the same period it sent the brilliant, scholarly Ingalls 
to W;'shington, an intellectual diamond, a writer who en- 
riched the world's literature with his pen and contributed 
to it at least one immortal poem. 

It sent a noble man and a just and far-seeing judge to 
the Supreme bench of the United States in Justice Brewer. 

In William C. Hook it has contributed to the federal 
judiciary one of the keenest, most unerring analytical legal 
minds in America. 

A Kansas volunteer soldier, Frederick Funston, com- 
mands the army of the United States. He never has failed 
his government in time of need from the day of his enlist- 
ment. From the time he was sent after and captured the 
Filipino rebel leader Aguinaldo in the jungles of a strange 
land, and that time when, acting without orders, he in- 
stantly brought law and order out of chaos at San Fran- 
cisco during the earthquake, to the time he was commis- 
sioned to sit on the lid of an incipient war at Vera Cruz 
and prevent it from becoming a real war and a grave 
international complication, he has invariably "delivered 
the goods." 

Funston, however, is not the only military great man of 
Kansas. America 's greatest expert in gunnery is Brigadier 
General "William Crozier, for years chief of the ordnance 
department of the army and who came from Kansas. 

No one will deny either that we have great preachers. 
The Rev. Charles M. Sheldon is one of the great preachers 



MANY FAMOUS AUTHORS 289 

of his day. Only one other book, the Bible, has had more 
readers than Dr. Sheldon's "In His Steps." 

As to literature, wherever English is read or spoken, 
Ingalls' "Opportunity," Eugene Ware's "Washerwoman's 
Song-," and Carruth's "Each in His Own Tongue" are 
known and cherished. No poet or versifier, ancient or 
modern, is more widely read than our beloved Walt Mason, 
and few have written more appealing lines than his "Little 
Green Tents ' ' and ' ' Morning in Kansas. ' ' We have no 
apologies to make for the literary product of William Allen 
White, E. W. Howe, F. D. Coburn, Cyrus Townsend Brady, 
Margaret Hill McCarter, Esther M. Clark, Frank W. Black- 
mar and many others, not to mention at least half a dozen 
great editors and as many famous illustrators of Eastern 
journals and magazines, who were born in or brought up 
in Kansas. 

It is not generally known that five Eastern college pres- 
idents are from Kansas. Nor that four young men, born 
in Kansas in the '70s, three of them in Lawrence and one 
in Leavenworth, are the world's construction kings in the 
building trade. They are the men who have developed the 
type and are the builders of the great sky-scrapers, the 
architectural wonders of the world. 

In science Kansas has outstripped many older states and 
has furnished more men to the Department of Agriculture 
at Washington than all the other states put together. 

Last but not least it has produced at least one great 
benefactor of the human race in John P. St. John, staunch 
advocate of prohibition. 

This is merely a cursory, off-hand list offered in rebuttal 
to the dyspeptic editor's lament. The half has not been 
told. 

Kansas has a shining record of accomplishment in the 
field of successful, constructive legislation. Its prohibitory 
law, equal suffrage law, its "blue sky" law, its bank guar- 



290 KANSAS PROSPERITY 

anty law (greeted with jeers, then encored and then imi- 
tated), its primary election law, its anti-pass law, its pure 
food law, and its state text book law, show the progressive, 
forward-looking spirit of the Kansas people. 



KANSAS PROSPERITY 

From an Address at the Kansas State Agricultural College, 
January 19, 1916. 

Let me say something as to the substantial prosperity of 
our state. We are a fortunate commonwealth. Our per 
capita taxable wealth of $1,630, is greater than that of any 
other state and twice as high as that of the United States 
as a whole. It gives us a total of nearly 3 billion dollars 
— $2,884,024,600 to be exact — of taxable wealth, an increase 
of 79 million dollars the past year — and enables us to main- 
tain a state tax rate of $1.25 on a thousand — lower than 
that of any other state with one exception. It is interest- 
ing to note that of the taxable property of Kansas, a little 
more than 15 per cent, ($436,721,785) is owned by the 
various public utility companies. The 9,248 miles of rail- 
ways in the state, with their equipment are assessed at 
$386,422,000; the property of the gas and pipe line com- 
panies at 20 million dollars and street and interurban rail- 
ways at $13,313,000. A total of more than 100 millioil 
dollars of property owned by churches, lodges and public 
institutions is entirely exempt from taxation. 

The state itself owns property in its various public insti- 
tutions valued at 21^/2 million dollars — more than double 
the value of the state's property when these bonds were 
issued twelve years ago. No doubt we have not expended 
all the money for public institutions that many of us would 
like to see expended; but doubling our state property and 
the expenses of its administration in a decade can hardly 



HUGE BANK DEPOSITS 291 

be called a niggardly policy. Nearly 2 million dollars was 
distributed during the year thru our hospitals, asylums, 
orphanages and other public and private charities. 

Kansas municipal bonds are as salable and at as low 
rate of interest, as any municipal bonds in the nation. At 
least half of the municipal securities issued by Kansas 
cities and towns are owned in Kansas; 10 million dollars 
of such bonds being held as an investment by the state 
school funds. If any of our Eastern friends in Wall Street 
or elsewhere own Kansas municipal bonds and want to get 
rid of them, I guarantee them a premium at any time. The 
brewery interests proclaim to the world that Kansas is on 
the high road to financial ruin, but at the same time they 
invest their surplus in Kansas municipal bonds. They buy 
them because they know sober Kansas pays its debts, and 
its bonds are worth more than 100 cents on the dollar. 

The prosperity of Kansas is shown in many ways. Our 
bank deposits of $224,110,576 are the largest per capita of 
any state — an increase of 23 million dollars in the year 
1915; our 84,000 automobiles — that's what it was yester- 
day and they've increased since — and will increase still 
more rapidly as we improve our roads — as we will — gives 
one car to every sixth family — a record equaled by only 
two other states; our 589 telephone companies with their 
831 exchanges and 340,000 telephones, gives a 'phone to 
every family of five — the largest percentage of any state; 
our farm products in 1915 of $341,561,000 and our live- 
stock valued at $310,655,000; our 325 million dollars of 
manufacturing products in 1915 — all give us reason for 
congratulation. 

The state has a permanent school fund of $10,485,299, 
and has invested in its school property more than 28 mil- 
lion dollars — an increase of 1% million dollars this year. 
We spent in the last year, $12,210,000 for educational pur- 
poses — an increase of almost 1 million dollars. We have 
enrolled in our colleges 27,000 students — the largest college 
attendance in proportion to population of any state. Our 



292 KANSAS PROSPERITY 

state university, agricultural college and normal schools 
received from the state $1,660,000 more last year than their 
cost of maintenance a decade ago; so while our schools are 
not all that we are going to make them, we are making 
progress, and the state may be proud of the fact that we 
have less than 2 per cent illiteracy- — next to the lowest of 
any state in the nation. 

Yes, Kansas is a prosperous state, but there are some 
things which we do not have. More than half a million 
of our boys and girls never saw an open bar-room ; we 
have only fourteen women in Kansas state prison ; we send 
only about two-fifths as many men to jail to the thousand of 
population as does the nation as a whole ; we have a great 
scarcity of poor-farms and paupers; we don't have nearly 
so many funerals as do other states, our death rate being 
extremely low; we have fewer tenants and more home- 
owners in proportion to population ; and we drink very 
little booze. With these exceptions, I think you will agree 
with me that Kansas is all right. 

I do not think we can find anywhere else on the face of 
the earth a million and three-quarters of people who will 
grade up as well ; who have a greater respect for law ; who 
are as responsive to the denaands of decency and fairness 
and the higher standards of citizenship. I believe we have 
here the finest example in all America of a pure democracy 
standing firmly for the rights of all men without regard 
to race, creed or condition. 

It is a privilege and a blessing to live in a state with 
such a record as Kansas has made and to have done some- 
thing toward making that record. We have only to go on 
in the spirit in which we have begun, indeed our develop- 
ment in citizenship as gauged by its future possibilities 
has just begun in Kansas. 

Never in the history of the state has Kansas been in 
better condition physically and financially and never have 
our people been more keenly alive to our opportunities for 
progress and our possibilities of true greatness. We are 



A STATE WITH OPPORTUNITIES 293 

entering the year 1916 with most brilliant prospects. From 
the bottom of my heart, I congratulate you upon what we 
have already attained and upon our opportunities for the 
future. 



KANSAS IDEALS 

From an Address at the Sterling, Kan., Chautauqua, July 

24, 1917. 

I may be pardoned, I hope, if I say something today 
about the state and the people I am so proud to serve as 
their chief executive. 

Now, Kansas is a great state. We are always ready to 
admit it is a great state, and we tell everybody it is a great 
state. We Kansas people are accused of being unable to 
talk about anything else. We are accused of blowing our 
horn too much. It is said of us that we are much given 
to hot air and statistics. However, I deny the hot air. You 
and I know the half never has been told about Kansas, 
either with hot air or statistics. 

We have no royal families, nor moss-covered ruins in 
Kansas. We are just a plain every-day kind of people 
who believe with all our hearts in being decent, in being 
honest, in being fair; and we want a square deal for our 
neighbors as well as for ourselves. 

There has been forced upon me one conviction. It is 
this : That nowhere else in this great 'country is there a 
place so well fitted for the development of an efficient and 
dominant type of manhood and womanhood as in Kansas. 
The greatest thing we produce or create in Kansas is man- 
hood — man-power. 

Manhood and womanhood such as I speak of is the con- 
sequence of industry, thrift and clean living, of optimism, 
courage and energy. It is the product of a people's ideals, 
a people's surroundings, the conditions of their life and 



294 KANSAS IDEALS 

living, their tliouglit, their standards of conduct, their 
ambitions and their determination truly to educate and 
direct their children. It is the product of their pride in 
and love for home, for the home community, for their state 
and their native land. It is the product of their vigilant 
wat ell fulness over everything affecting the welfare of their 
institutions and their devotion to God's great cause — 
human progress. 

It is these conditions of life and living, these standards 
of conduct and morals, that we have made possible, or pro- 
vided for in Kansas, that have made us truly the happiest, 
the busiest, the most prosperous people in the world today. 
Kansas was headed right at the start. "To the stars 
through difficulties,'' was its motto of statehood, now im- 
mortalized in its Great Seal. I wish to impress upon you 
that we have only to go on in the spirit in which we have 
begun ; that indeed our development in citizenship, as 
gauged by its future possibilities, has just begun in Kansas. 
We now have nearly 2 million people in the state. There 
is room for millions more of the right kind of people but 
there is not an inch of space left for the wrong kind. 

Nation building, state building, is really community 
building and home building. As are the communities in 
which we live, so will be the state. It rises no higher, has 
no loftier ideals: it will face problems and responsibilities 
no more successfnlly than its communities and neighbor- 
hoods. You are making the state in making your little 
town and its surroundings what they are and what they 
should be. 

This is a great day in which we are living, and fortunate 
are we in having Kansas for our dwelling place. The 
mighty principles of the Prince of Peace were never more 
regnant in the people's hearts than they are in our hearts 
today, in Kansas and in the nation. We are striving to 
make the Golden Rule the rule of life. More and more are 
we giving practical application to the eternal ideals of fair- 
play and the scjuare deal which fell from the Master's lips 



THE WOMEN OF KANSAS 295 

in the Sermon on the Mount ; to bring peace on earth and 
good will to men. 

The people of this country and of Kansas are becoming 
more and more interested in the vital questions and pro- 
jects which have to do with the advancement of the citizen- 
ship of this country. We are taking these problems up and 
settling them finally along the right line. At times we 
become confused, but the people of America, and especially 
of -Kansas, have within them the sound ideas, the inspira- 
tion and the true spirit of democracy, with the courage, 
the enterprise and the determination to try out and test 
these ideas in practice. It is in this way that we finally 
shall attain the ideals to which we are looking forward. 
Praise for what we already have done in Kansas is due to 
the average man. Credit for what we are yet to do also 
will go to him. The reason is, this is his kind of a country, 
and that no country can be greater than its average citizen- 
ship. 



THE FUN OF BEING GOVERNOR 

From an Address Delivered to the Ladies of the Maccabees, 
Topeka Auditorium, June 27, 1918. 

I wish that every Kansan — every Kansas man and woman 
— might take turns at being governor at Topeka — that all 
of you might become governors in fact as you are in reality. 

Of course there would be something doing then, and there 
ought to be. I'm sure there would be when the women 
folks got there. 

You may consider that last remark facetious, if you 
choose, but I wish to say that I have a great respect for 
Kansas women. I married one of them and my mother was 
another — a pioneer Kansas woman. No finer women ever 



296 THE FUN OF BEING GOVERNOR 

lived than these pioneer women. But you know and I know 
what Kansas women have done and are doing. 

I have still another reason, a mighty good reason, for 
respecting the women of Kansas and approving of their 
judgment and discrimination — they made me governor, the 
first Kansas governor to be elected by the women of Kan- 
sas. I wouldn't trade that distinction for any other earthly 
honor. It will be about the first thing I shall mention to 
Saint Peter when he asks me what special business, if any, 
has brought me to the pearly gates. Then I shall ask him 
if he knows that in proportion to population, Kansas has 
more boys and girls in the public schools, more students in 
its colleges and universitj^ and fewer men and women in 
jail, than any other state in the Union. And that much 
less than 2 per cent of its population cannot read and write 
and "figger. " 

Then I may inquire if he has ever heard about a Kansas 
man named St. John Avho drove the snakes out of Kansas. 
If he has read Dr. Sheldon's book. If he knows that Jess 
Willard, champion of the world, is a Kansas man and that 
Satan and Whisky stand no more chance with him than 
Jack Johnson did. 

Then I shall tell him that Walter Johnson, the world's 
best pitcher, hails from Kansas; that "Smoky Joe" Wood, 
of the Boston "Red Socks" came from St. George, Kan.; 
that it was Fred Funston who sat on the lid at Vera Cruz 
;ind at Brownsville; that we have the biggest Shorthorn 
steer in the world at Eureka and that we have the most 
good-humored kicker in the world at Emporia, in the per- 
son of William Allen White. 

If this doesn't get me in, I shall proceed to tell Saint 
Peter that Kansas was fighting for freedom six years before 
Lincoln wrote his emancipation proclamation ; that we gave 
trainloads and shiploads of perfectly good Kansas wheat, 
worth $1.50 a bushel right out on the farm, to helpless, 
starving Belgium, without price; that Kansas saved the 
American nation from what would have been the blackest 



KANSAS HAS GREAT RESOURCES 297 

panic iu its history, by coming to the front at the most 
critical and crucial moment with the biggest wheat crop 
that ever was grown or harvested. If this fails me I can 
still fall back on some of Coburn's and Jake Mohler's agri- 
cultural reports. 



A GREATER KANSAS CITIZENSHIP. 

From an Address to the Lawrence Commercial Cluh, Jan- 
uary 10, 1912. 

I think the Creator must have been in a particularly 
happy frame of mind when He made "this grassy paral- 
lelogram we call Kansas." I think He must have had His 
eye on this particular spot when He pronounced all His 
works "good." But, gentlemen, soil and climate, rolling 
prairies and luscious grasses, hill and valley, river and 
plain — these of themselves do not make a great state. They 
are only the start — the foundation — the stage setting as it 
were, where the drama of a people's life will be enacted. 

We have had a great start; we have great resources and 
almost unlimited possibilities, but what the Greater Kansas 
will be, depends primarily upon the sort of men and women 
who constitute the state. It is as true now as ever that — 
"it is men, high-minded men who make a state." 

And so the first concern of every patriotic citizen, the 
first concern of every individual who loves his state, the 
first concern of every association that seeks the betterment 
of conditions under which we live, the first concern of 
every school — yes, and of every church — must be the qual- 
ity of the citizenship which the people of Kansas maintain. 
On that more than on any other thing depends our Greater 
Kansas. 

It seems to me that this is the first principle of good 
citizenship — a willingness to accede to that which is best 



298 A GREATER KANSAS CITIZENSHIP 

for the whole people — not what is best for me or for my 
particular interests; not what is best for my particular 
friends, or the particular line of business in which I may 
happen to be engaged, but what is best for all the people. 

I rejoice, my friends, in the firm conviction that this 
spirit of broader, deeper patriotism — the patriotism that 
takes into account the well-being and the rights of the 
humblest citizen — is making such rapid headway in our 
age and generation. 

And so I come here as a faithful native son of liberty- 
loving Kansas as one who is deeply interested with you in 
everything that pertains to the welfare of this matchless 
state, to join hands with you God-fearing people of this 
splendid city of Lawrence in a solemn pledge this evening 
that we will live our lives righteously, that we will fight 
the good fight for human progress, for loftier ideals, for 
a square deal and exact justice for every citizen, for the 
sacred things which so deeply concern the welfare of your 
city, that we will strive unceasingly to quicken the public 
sense of Christian duty, and do our part, be it large or 
small, in making the w^orld a little cleaner, a little more 
decent, a little happier, a little more God-like. 



THE KANSAS SPIRIT. 

From an Address at the First Methodist Church, Hoyt, 
Kan., May 30, 1914. 

As you know, Kansas has prospered materially as no 
other state ; it has built great cities, splendid colleges, won- 
derful industrial concerns; its prosperous people by thrift 
and enterprise have piled millions of surplus wealth in her 
banks and savings institutions. But better than the splen- 
dor and wealth of its cities and farms, is the kind heart 
of the Kansas people that beats in the homes of Kansas, 



THE KANSAS SPIRIT 299 

the high tide of human brotherhood that throbs in their 
veins, and the spirit of justice and lofty ideals which ani- 
mates the soul of every good citizen of Kansas with a little 
more fervor, I think, than it does the citizen of any other 
state. 

There never was a time, it seems to me, in the history of 
the world when there was so much real interest in human 
welfare ; so much indignation at oppression and injustice ; 
so much of the spirit of fair play; so much real sympathy 
for misfortune; such high ideals as there are today. I re- 
joice that all over Kansas, the sturdy, ambitious citizen- 
ship is throwing its forces with greater zeal than ever be- 
fore, behind those constructive measures which make for 
the best in home and community betterment; for the best 
in social, moral and educational uplift; for all the influ- 
ences which are active in the building of manly boys, of 
womanly girls, of clean and useful men and women, and 
which are doing their full share in the solution of the great 
human interest questions that will make the world better 
and happier and stimulate a richer and more abundant life. 



POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT 

Mr. Capper's political career is unique in that the first 
time he became a candidate for public office he met defeat 
at the polls, only to ''come back" in the next state cam- 
paign, two years later, when for a second time he was the 
Republican candidate for governor. He was re-elected to 
that office at the end of the next two year period, by a 
majority of 162,000, the largest ever given a gubernatorial 
candidate in Kansas, and before the end of his second term 
as governor was elected to the United States Senate by the 
largest majority ever given a candidate for that office. 
Thruout his political career, both before and after he be- 
came a candidate for office, he stood courageously for pro- 
gressive principles, daring to champion them even when to 
do so spelled for him temporary personal, political disaster. 
This fact adds interest to his utterances on purely partisan 
and political issues. 



INTEGRITY THE ONLY SOUND BASIS FOR A 
POLITICAL PARTY 

From a Speech Made in Coffeyville on the Eve of the 
Primary Election, August 4, 1912. 

For one, I am not afraid to trust the judgment of the 
people and I am suspicious of any scheme in the courts or 
otherwise, which seeks to prevent the people from exercis- 
ing their right and their authority. 

I am actuated in this campaign by an earnest desire to 

301 



302 POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT 

stand for what I believe to be square and honest politics, 
and to s.ive the Republican party, of which I am proud to 
count myself a member, from certain defeat and from final 
and total disruption. 

In taking this stand I want to say furthermore that I 
have been a Republican all my life, I expect to continue a 
Republican, and I am opposed to the organization in Kan- 
sas of the proposed new third party. 

I am a Republican now because I know that that party, 
in spite of the manipulations of self-seeking politicians, is 
in this state the champion of human right, that it has kept 
step with the most progressive spirit of the age, and has 
been a power in the creation and crystallization of the 
progressive sentiment of the entire country. In Kansas 
the Republican party stands for clean government and 
untainted politics. 

I recognize the absolute necessity of political parties, but 
the party belongs to the people — not the people to the 
party, and it is for the members of the party to say what 
the party shall do. 

I think I know the temper of the Republicans of Kansas- 
They are in no mood to stand any political jugglery this 
year. 

I abhor clap-trap and demagoguery; I have no use for 
partisanship built up on cheap appeals to popular preju- 
dice ; I know that class hatred may be easily fanned into 
passion that would be fatal to the very existence of our 
republic but I also believe with all the intensity of my 
being that the general welfare stands above and beyond 
privilege, profit and party. I am in favor of the progres- 
sive movement because it means a more intelligent and 
effective participation of the people in the control of their 
own affairs; it means that the representatives of the people 
shall obey the people and not obey the bosses and the priv- 
ileged interests; that' taxation shall not fall heaviest on the 
poor; that justice and not technicality shall control the 
courts of law; that the rights of the poor are more sacred 



MANY PROBLEMS TO SOLVE 303 

than the privileges of the rich ; that human welfare is bet- 
ter worth working and fighting for than property and 
profits; and that this government must and shall be de- 
livered from the domination of special privilege. 

We frequently hear in these days that certain men are 
experimenting with new plans of government and danger- 
ous expedients. But if I mistake not, the controlling pur- 
pose is not that of new experiments, but to bring this old 
government back to where the fathers left it to the people. 
The things done in these efforts may not always be wise, 
but all these strivings are but the effort of our great 
democracy to find and get hold of itself under our new 
industrial conditions. We do not need a new gospel; we 
need rather to preach the creed of Washington and Lin- 
coln and Roosevelt with a tongue of fire thruout the land. 

I have great confidence in the ability of the American 
people to select public servants who will solve the perplex- 
ing problems that confront us and if these public servants 
are held to strict account by the people they will be more 
alert and we will have a better government. 

A progressive, wide-awake people always have new prob- 
lems to solve. New conditions, and fresh difficulties meet 
us as we advance. If we stood still — as it seems to me 
some people are anxious to do — our only problem Avould 
be to keep off the rust and decay. But Kansas is going 
forward "To the stars thru difficulties." Nowhere is 
found a higher grade of citizenship — nowhere a people 
more able to solve, and solve righteously, the complexities 
of modern civilization. 

When I read of the unblushing purchase of whole coun- 
ties of voters in Ohio; the reckless expenditure of barrels 
of boodle for a Wisconsin Senatorship ; the shameless muni- 
cipal debaucheries of Pittsburgh and San Francisco and 
New York; the filthy rottenness of Illinois legislatures, I 
rejoice that I live in decent law-respecting Kansas. I do 
not believe such things could happen in our state. 

Taught from infancy that my first allegiance is due to 



304 POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT 

my state and my country, I am one of those who believe 
that a party should stand for ideals and principles that 
mean something; who believe there is a place in politics 
for honesty and sincerity and decency and truth ; I am 
one of those who believe that parties are organized not to 
divide the spoils and plunder of office, but to maintain 
the ascendency of progressive, patriotic principles ; I am 
one who believes that the brazen purchase of a seat in the 
United States Senate is one of the most monstrous of crimes 
against the people, whether committed by a Democrat in 
Montana or a Republican in Illinois ; that the character 
and record of a party's candidate should emphasize the 
declarations of that party's platforms; that Kansas de- 
serves as her public servants the best brains, the best energy 
and the best morals of the state. I believe that the finan- 
cial pirates, the audacious promoters of watered stock- 
jobbing schemes and business combines who prey on the 
people and violate the law, should be made to serve their 
terms in prison ; that the rich bank president who robs his 
depositors must not be paroled, but must pay the same 
penalty, and just as promptly, as the poor man whose 
hunger may have compelled him to steal. 



A CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR. 

From a Campaign Speech at Lawrence on the Eve of the 
Election, November, 1912' 

You have been informed by your chairman that I am 
a candidate for governor, and I presume it is not inappro- 
priate for me to speak to you briefly on that subject. I 
can only say to you that I stand pledged to a business ad- 
ministration — and by that I mean an administration that 
will look after the business of the state first, last and all 
the time, honestly, fearlessly and with justice to all. 

I think the people of Kansas should regard their state 



IDEALS OF PUBLIC SERVICE 305 

government as a great big corporation, in which every 
citizen is an equal stockholder. Your chief executive is 
the man whom you choose to manage the business of this 
corporation, with fairness and justice to every stockholder. 
His honest intentions must be beyond question, and his 
ability must have been proved and demonstrated. 

If the people of Kansas think I meet these requirements 
— and they should elect no man who does not measure up 
to their highest ideals — I pledge you that I will bring to 
the executive office all the ability that I possess ; all of the 
earnest purpose and all of the energy that I have in the 
past devoted to my personal business. I shall administer 
the affairs of this state with an eye single to the best in- 
terests of the whole people ; I shall do my very best to give 
the state a clean, honest and progressive administration. 
I shall work for the lowest taxes consistent with an ad- 
ministration that keeps pace with the progress of the times, 
and shall do my best to keep out the grafters; the leeches; 
the hangers on ; the jobbers ; the useless officials, clerks and 
commissions; to abolish the excessive salaries; to eliminate 
the jokers in legislative acts; to head off all extravagant 
appropriations ; and shall endeavor to handle the business 
of the state with justice and economy and on the broad 
basis of the greatest good to the greatest number. 

I was born in Kansas ; I have lived here all my life ; and 
every interest I have is centered in Kansas. Whatever 
measure of success I have achieved in life has come to me 
as a citizen of Kansas. I have unbounded pride in the 
state and unlimited confidence in its future. I have done 
what I could for a better and greater Kansas. My con- 
tinuous residence at the capital of the state for over twenty - 
seven years has given me unusual opportunity to become 
thoroly familiar with every department of the state's 
business. I have advocated certain principles and certain 
ideals of public service and I have ende'avored to live up 
to these ideals and these principles. 

I shall make no brass band campaign for this office. I 



306 A CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR 

am not an "'orator" nor a ''spell-binder," but I do not 
think that tlie voters of Kansas are in any mood to be 
stampeded this year by flights of oratory or spread eagle- 
ism. As a candidate I shall go before the people with 
nothing mere than a plain, straightforward platform of 
tin' things 1 believe my business experience equips; jne to 
do, and my pledges will be limited to those I think I can 
honestly fulfill. 

If I become governor I will take the office untrammeled 
by a single promise. No special interest, no individual, 
no boss, no faction can dictate to me. I wear no man's 
collar — my hands are not tied and will not be. If elected, 
I shall be the governor and shall administer the powers 
entrusted to me without favoritism and without prejudice 
toward any man or any faction. 



AN APPEAL FOR GENUINE PATRIOTISM. 

From an Address at Topeka State Fair, September 14, 1916. 

Because the nations of Europe are drunk with blood; 
because of the appalling destruction of that awful war; 
because it is the most terrible, the most colossal, the most 
shocking tragedy humanity ever has known — a great tide 
of fear, of hate, and of doubt and suspicion has swept over 
the whole world. Never since life on earth began, has there 
been such a tremendous need of true patriotism, of high 
moral courage, of forbearance and mercy — the high and 
the holy patriotism which dedicates itself to life and prog- 
ress, not to death and destruction. 

Nowhere is the spirit of this braver and higher patriot- 
ism stronger than in America, because nowhere on earth 
is there a people with a greater passion for justice, for 
liberty, for equality. America never has failed to prove 
it. It will just as surely prove it again and again. We 



WHAT THE FLAG TYPIFIES 307 

are dedicated to it. In the inmost soul of every American, 
whether he realizes it or not, burns a fierce and an over- 
whelming determination to be right; right no matter what 
the cost; right no matter what the consequences; right 
tho the heavens fall, tho we give up everything to be right. 
This is the undaunted, the undefeated, the unconquerable 
spirit of the martyrs and was bred in us. This is what the 
flag means to us. Its stars symbolize our trust in God; 
its blue field our noble purpose; its white bars the high 
courage of a spotless patriotism without the stain of mur- 
der, of revenge, or of war for greed; its red bars the cour- 
age that dares all in support of the right. These ideals 
are summed up in one word — -Americanism. And guided 
by our true patriotism, you may depend upon it, we need 
not fear anything, because being right we shall be twice 
armed and unconquerable. This is the kind of patriotism 
we are standing for in America, a kind that knows no fear. 
We dare to have this kind of patriotism, this kind of cour- 
age, this kind of humanity and this kind of sanity-^in 
America. 



A PLEA FOR LOYALTY TO THE GOVERNMENT. 

From an Address at Campbell College, Holton, June 2, 1915. 

As you know, I have raised my voice constantly and 
emphatically against the folly and wickedness of war. I 
was brought up a Quaker. A fine Quaker father and 
mother taught me that war as a method of settling disputes 
between nations was barbarous — uncivilized — and so for 
many years I have advocated the gospel of peace. 

I have talked against war because I considered it a 
wrong against the masses of the people who do the fight- 
ing and who must stand the brunt of battle and make the 
sacrifices. War is a senseless, irrational way to settle 
difficulties between nations. 

War is not to be undertaken until all reasonable means 



308 A PLEA FOR LOYALTY 

have failed. But the ruthless conduct of the German 
Kaiser in deliberately sinking American vessels, in taking 
the lives of innocent American citizens in disregard of the 
rights of humanity, is so unjustifiable, so indefensible, so 
criminal, that all patriotic citizens feel our government can 
no longer condone it without loss of a self-respect for life 
and liberty that is dearer than life itself. If we would 
maintain American honor and American traditions, we 
must defend them and ourselves against these murderous 
assaults on human life and human rights. 

I believe this to be the hour of greatest trial in our exist- 
ence as a nation — the gravest crisis that ever has con- 
fronted us. We must keep our heads. We must not be 
stampeded by passion, nor by rash counsel. Above all 
things we must stand together. 

Kansans abhor w..r. They have been and will continue 
to be staunch advocates of peace. But first of all we are 
loyal Americans, and I know that this state, irrespective 
of birthplace, and regardless of party affiliations or of 
political creeds, will uphold the President and Congress 
in this crisis and give loyal support to the government at 
Washington. 

The flag has a deep and holy meaning to every Kansan. 
No Kansan ever has flinched in his duty as a patriotic 
American and never will. As a state we shall acquiesce 
in whatever may be the wishes of the national government. 
And whenever the call may come, and whatever the order 
may be for the protection and defense of national interests 
and the rights of humanity, Kansas will respond unitedly, 
promptly, loyally, fearlessly and fervently. God help us 
in this trying hour. 



MUST REVISE STATE'S BUSINESS METHODS 

From an Address to Harvey County Republicans at Annual 
Banquet at Newton, Kan., Nov. 20, 1914. 

My friends, I want to say a few words about some of the 
problems which confront us Kansas people as a state, and 
about what I hope, with the sympathy and eo-operation of 
good citizens without regard to political party, to accom- 
plish as your public servant in the next two years. I have 
no panacea to offer you for our political ills. I have no 
pet schemes to put thru and no revolutionary measures 
to propose. All that I hope to accomplish is to bring to 
the administration of your public system, modern business 
methods and to do the very best that we can do under ex- 
isting conditions. 

I believe we all will admit that the machinery of govern- 
ment — state government, county government, and muni- 
cipal government, as it exists in Kansas today is not en- 
tirely ideal. It is expensive and cumbersome, as is amply 
attested by the fact that in the last ten years the total 
expense of the government for the state of Kansas has in- 
creased from 16 million dollars a year to more than 30 mil- 
lion dollars, while population has but slightly increased, and 
this without any conspicuous graft or corrupt deals, with- 
out any public official pilfering from the treasury. We 
have, of course, received some benefits from the increased 
taxes. We have built up many institutions which are a 
credit to the state, but no man will dare say that the people 
of Kansas in the last ten years have received 100 per cent 
benefit from the money they have paid in taxes. 

In my opinion, many changes must be made in our sys- 
tem of government. As a state, we must follow the example 
set by the great railway systems and business corporations 

309 



310 REVISE STATE'S BUSINESS METHODS 

in adopting modern scientific business methods, in the 
elimination of useless positions and in requiring the very 
highest efficiency on the part of every public servant. And 
this is not the work of a day, or even of one administra- 
tion. It requires study of the most scientific nature, and 
statesmanship of the highest order; all prompted and 
backed by a determination to give the people of the state 
the best system of government that can be devised for them. 
Other states of the Union are taking up this big problem 
and studying it, are investigating and experimenting; and 
Kansas must step into line and revise her business methods, 
taking advantage of everything which will promote effi- 
ciency and economy. And, this work must extend thru- 
out our entire system, from the governor in the state house 
down to the township trustee. 

Kansas needs many things which cost money. The stand- 
ard of our rural schools must be raised and our state edu- 
cational institutions kept on a par with those of any state 
in the Union. We must improve, as rapidly as possible, 
our public roads and highways. Kansas could profitably 
use ten times the money that our tax levy provides, but 
there is a time for all things and I do not believe that the 
people of Kansas are in any mood to sanction larger ex- 
penditures at this time or heavy investments for the future. 
The world is going tliru one of the great crises in its 
history. The business of the Avorld has been demoralized 
to an extent that we in prosperous, sun-warmed, God- 
favored Kansas do not realize. We in Kansas have felt 
only the outermost effects of the terrible disaster which is 
convulsing the world; we do not appreciate the suffering, 
the want and the woe which have settled like a pall of night 
upon the greater part of the civilized world. 

We are not niggardly but with the uncertainties that the 
future holds, even to the most optimistic of us, it behooves 
us to conserve our resources, to retrench in every possible 
way in our expenditures, and to bide our time in faith 
and trust that conditions will brighten and things be better 



REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE GOOD 311 

in the near future. I am not pessimistic; I do not think 
thar, America is dae for a period of business depression. 
On the pontrary, I do not see how we can fail eventually 
to profit by the folly and wickedness of the European na- 
tions who have brought this awful woe upon the world. 
But, Kansas as a state is in no position to gamble on the 
future, and I believe that this is the year of all years to 
use the pruning knife on appropriations ; to eliminate every 
useless public position ; to see to it that men who are elected . 
to perform certain duties perform them themselves instead 
of delegating them to assistants ; and in short, to get down 
to an economic basis in public affairs just as the business 
man does, just as the housewife does, just as the farmer 
does when hard times overtake them. 

It shall be my effort to establish such a policy in our 
public business, and I ask the earnest co-operation of the 
people of Kansas as a whole, and especially of the members 
of the Republican party, in this work. We Republicans 
in the state and in the nation lost the confidence of the 
people two years ago and were ''fired from our jobs"; in 
the meantime, we have healed the differences in our own 
ranks and . the people have given evidence of a renewed 
faith in us. But, we are on trial and we must make good, 
and make good as a party in the next two years prior to 
the Presidential campaign of 1916. I believe we are going 
to do it. I believe it is the earnest desire of every Repub- 
lican in the state of Kansas that we do this and I am count- 
ing on their heartiest and fullest co-operation. Your gov- 
ernor cannot do it all alone, he must have his party behind 
him ; he must have the whole people of the state behind 
him. Our effort today must be to bring into concerted 
action all who are earnestly intent upon combating the 
social and political evils, and on abolishing the inefficient 
systems that curse the world — all who would speed the 
progress of decency and purity and honesty and justice 
and peace and righteousness and brotherhood among men. 

And so I have come here as one who is deeply interested 



312 REVISE STATE'S BUSINESS METHODS 

with you in everythiug that pertains to the welfare of the 
great state of Kansas; to join with you this evening in a 
pledge that we shall keep up the good fight for human 
progress, for loftier ideals, for a square deal and exact 
justice for every citizen, for the sacred things and the 
vitally necessary things which so deeply concern its wel- 
fare ; that we shall strive unceasingly to quicken the public 
sense of Christian duty and public duty, and do our part, 
be it large or small, in making our beloved state a little 
cleaner, a little more decent, a little happier, a little more 
God-like. 



NEED OF COMMON HONESTY 

From an Address at LeLovp, Kan., Modern Woodmen 
Picnic, Aug. 24, 1916. 

When we get right down to it, what this country needs, 
my friends, is fewer laws, the strict and straight enforce- 
ment of all laws, more righteousness in the court house, the 
purification and reform of our system of jurisprudence — 
and finally — more real men, men of sterling integrity as 
well as ability in all walks of life, and saner, simpler, truer, 
higher standards of living, as a people and as a nation. 

We need — not more laws — but straight, honest, aggres- 
sive, impartial enforcement of the laws we have. Less tech- 
nicality and quibbling in our courts. Speedier justice and 
cheaper justice. 

How many poor men and poor widows are there who 
have learned, thru bitter experience, that we have blood- 
sucking public leeches who fatten off of the misfortunes 
of poor men and poor widows ; that we have public officials, 
lawyers and courts which, apparently, make it a business, 
by means of many fees, or by long expensive legal processes, 
to consume all tlie pro])erty or money that these courts or 
lawyers can get within their clutches. And we all know 



MORE COMMON SENSE NEEDED 313 

iiow potent and how all-prevailing in court is the long 
pocketbook and the smart lawyer. 

We need a system which shall make it impossible for 
shrcAvd and tricky lawyers to thwart the plain intent of 
the law and delay the administration of justice. 

We want laws made so plain, so simple, so direct that 
the humblest citizen, as well as the most powerful corpora- 
tion may know them, and understand them and resi)ect 
tiTem and obey them. 

What we need is more old-fashioned common honesty in 
the court room ; more plain common sense and even-handed 
justice between man and man. 



DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR GOVERNMENT 

From a Speech Made at Lawrence, Kan., During the 1914 
Political Campaign. 

I am for a policy of strictest economy in public expendi- 
tures; the elimination of all extravagant appropriations, 
big and little ; for a reduction in the number of job-hold- 
ers wherever possible ; for wiping out useless boards and 
bureaus, and all the unnecessary jobs usually created for 
political purposes. 

We don't want to be niggardly and miserly — but just 
provide a full measure of plenty and stop there. The peo- 
ple of Kansas are not stingy. They want their state to 
rank v/ith any in the Union in all things that tend to make 
a people happy and prosperous ; but they want and are en- 
titled to, and must and will have, a dollar's worth of 
genuine service, a dollar's worth of actual value, for every 
dollar of the people's money expended. 

I am not here as a faultfinder or pessimist. I rejoice 
that the Avorld is growing better every day. Our govern- 
ment is on a higher plane than ever before, but it does seem 
to me that we still have too many useless and foolish laws, 
tinkered and patched by journeymen jobbers, too much 
legislation framed in dark corners; too many secret cau- 



314 DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR GOVERNMENT 

cuses at Washington and Topeka — where the crack of the 
party whip is heard ; too much of the public business hidden 
from the light of day. There has been too much political 
jockeying and "tomfoolery" in the legislature, too much 
playing footljall with public measures for mere partisan 
advantage while the people's interests suffered. 

There have been too many pardons and paroles, too many 
secret favors from judges and prosecuting officers for men 
of wealth and political pull. 

Our need is not more laws, but greater respect for those 
we now have ; aggressive and impartial enforcement of 
those laws, not for the little fellow alone, but also for the 
higher-up grafters and the powerful and influential of- 
fenders, who exploit the public for millions; a system that 
will abolish all the senseless forms, the foolish technicalities, 
the absui'd delays and the outrageous court costs that now 
make justice a farce ; a system that will imprison big thieves 
as well as little thieves, and guarantee fair play and an 
equal chance in the world for every human being. 

We must beware of noisy demagogues, human fire- 
brands, theoretical dreamers and violent fanatics, who teach 
the philosophy of discontent, who sow the seeds of social 
strife, who preach the doctrines of riot and disorder. 

We must be fair ; we must be just with big business that 
is honest and obeys the laws of our country. But big busi- 
ness must be made to understand at all times that right 
and justice and humanity cannot and will not be over- 
powered by the brute force of wealth and greed and op- 
pressive monopoly. 

The most vital of all our problems is that which concerns 
the M^aste of human life. Especially must we encourage 
every welfare measure, every educational movement, tend- 
ing to human conservation and development of the best 
type of manhood and womanhood. We are paying out SV^ 
million dollars every day in this country for punishing 
crime. Tn Kansas we spend annually three-quarters of a 
million dollars to house, feed and clothe unfortunate delin- 



NATION WIDE PROHIBITION 315 

qiieiits. The whole spirit of this advancing helpful age is 
in the future to prevent rather than to punish crime ; to 
prevent rather than to doctor vice; to raise the standard 
of citizenship, not only in the interest of good morals but 
as an economic measure, and to make our cities and our 
state better for the whole family to live in. 

I live in a city which consumes less intoxicating liquor 
than any other city of 50,000 in this big world ; more than 
that, it has, according to the official statistics, less crime, 
less illiteracy, less poverty and less immorality than any 
other city of 50,000 people — the result, I believe, of the 
strict enforcement of the prohibitory law. For that reason 
I hope to see a nation-wide prohibition law which will ban- 
ish the saloon from every state in the Union. 

I want to see better and stronger rural and grade schools 
for the benefit of the vast number of young people in Kan- 
sas unable to obtain the advantages of higher education; 
for more attention to the fundamental and practical in 
education, adjusting the schools to the vital needs of the 
people and to meet the actual problems of every-day life. 
"We appropriate over a million dollars a year for our col- 
leges, and it is money well spent, but we should not forget 
that 95 per cent of the children of this state never see the 
inside of a college. We must have education that fits not 
alone the few for the life they are to live, but an education 
that will fit the many, the great body of the common peo- 
ple, the bone and sinew of the state, for what they will un- 
dertake, that will make bread-winners rather than dream- 
ers of the children of Kansas, and give them an equal show 
in the race of life. 



MAKE POLITICS SERVE THE PEOPLE. 

From an Address Before the Emporia Republican Cluh, 
November, 1914. 

I am a candidate for governor because I believe the state 
needs for the next two years a clean-cut, straight-from-the- 



316 MAKE POLITICS SERVE PEOPLE 

shoulder business goverument and a governor who isn't 
afraid of anything or anybody, who believes from the 
crown of his head to the sole of his feet in an absolutely 
square deal, and who has the nerve to see that the people 
of Kansas get a square deal. I am not afraid to be that 
kind of a governor. Whether elected governor or not, it 
will always be my purpose to work for every measure, no 
matter by what political party it is proposed, which makes 
go\ernment cleaner, more efficient, more economical, and 
which will guarantee to every man and woman in Kansas 
fair play and equal opportunity. I wish you to know that 
I come before the people of the state absolutely free. I am 
carrying no political burdens or obligations. I do not care 
to be elected governor, if to be elected I must enter into 
any relations whatever with any person, any political fac- 
tion, or any business interests which make it impossible 
for me to serve the public honestly. When I cannot be 
honest i]i politics, I shall get out of politics. 

We must not forget that that state is greatest, that na- 
tion is greatest, which does most for its people. I am proud 
to support the present-day program which places humanity 
above the dollar; which inaugurates those vitally construc- 
tive measures, social, moral, educational and economic, that 
are destined to lift all humanity to a higher level; which 
demands for every individual, for the common man, no 
matter what his condition, color, or creed, a man's chance, 
the right to an equal opportunity, a fair field and no 
favors. It "s a program, my friends, which means much for 
the cause of justice, for the helpless, the unfortunate and 
the wronged, for the betterment of mankind, for better 
homes, better schools, better boys and girls duly trained 
for life's work, for the enactment of higher civic ideals, 
for an honest, clean and decent administration of public 
affairs — a program which is worthy the consecrated effort 
of every citizen of Douglas county who demands a square 



GOOD GOVERNMENT ESSENTIAL 317 

deal for himself and who is willing to accord a square deal 
to his neighbor and his associates. 

Friends, there is one thought which is appealing with 
constantly increasing force to men and women all over 
America. It is that we have got to bring government closer 
to the people ; that we must end misrule ; that we must stop 
making government a plaything for politicians and bosses, 
but rather a business and a science. We must use our 
politics to help the people and not to loot and exploit them. 

This responsibility comes right home to every one of us, 
not next year but now and will for years to come. It is a 
responsibility no thoughtful, earnest man or woman will 
shirk. 

' ' There are no rights against the people 's rights. ' ' There 
are no niterests against the interests of God and humanity. 
These are our interests and this our cause and problem. 
Let us go to it Kansas fashion. We need the help of every 
man and woman in Kansas to make our polities good poli- 
tics. We need the help of every man and woman in Doiiglas 
county to make our government good government. I urge 
it upon you earnestly — religiously — to come together and 
join in a deeply patriotic crusade for a better — and a finer 
— and a more militant citizenship in township, county, state 
and nation ; that we may indeed have a government for and 
by the people — for all the people — and for them alone. 

I have faith that the Republican party of Kansas, ac- 
tuated by this common cause — with vision to see and with 
courage to execute — -will gather up the common patriotism, 
the common courage and the common righteousness of the 
common people of this state and organize it into a mili- 
tant, progressive, disciplined force which forever more will 
rescue Kansas from spoilsmen domination and Democratic 
misrule, and give impetus and momentum to this great na 
tional movement for better government and the advance 
ment of the race. 



GOVERNMENTAL EXTRAVAGANCE AND USELESS 
OFFICES 

Fi'om a 1914 Campaign Speech at Osage City, Kan 

The rapidly increasing cost of government and the high 
cost of living are the biggest questions now confronting 
the country, and they are problems that must soon be 
solved. The whole American public seems wild with spend- 
ing. We are living high, in the family, in the town, and 
as a state and nation. 

A Democratic Congress has just framed up another river 
and harbor pork barrel graft of 53 million dollars — the 
largest in our history — an increase of 6 million over any 
previous appropriation — for rivers that float no ships and 
harbors that shelter no commerce — not a dollar of which 
comes to Kansas. 

Twenty-fiv»e years ago it cost less than $700,000 to run 
the entire Kansas state government for a year. Tho 
the population since then has not quite doubled, the cost 
now of running the business of the state is six times greater 
— or more than 4i/2 millions a year now as against $700,000 
twenty-five years ago. 

Now do not misunderstand me : I am not going to in- 
dulge in any of the demagogic clap-trap about high taxes 
which is the chief stock in trade of the cheap politician. 
You hardly ever hear of a man running for office who does 
not make profuse promises about reducing taxes — promises 
that are easily made and more easily forgotten. 

I need not remind you ,that the leaders of the Democratic 
party of Kansas went up and down the state in the cam- 
paign of two years ago upon a platform of buncombe and 
humbug, charging the Republicans with reckless extrav- 

.318 



HOW DEMOCRATS INCREASED TAXES 319 

agance and waste, promising the people of this state a "98 
to 2" business administration, and a reduction of 25 per 
cent in state taxes. But when given absolute control of the 
executive and legislative branches of the state government, 
the Democratic party made more offices and more taxes; 
increased the appropriations a half million dollars more 
than ever before in the history of the state, created seven 
new boards and commissions, added 294 clerks, inspectors 
and other employes, and increased the state payroll over 
$10,000 a month.' 

I should consider it the greatest honor that could possibly 
come to me — as great an honor as could possibly come to 
any man — to be the first native Kansan elected governor 
of this state, and to be the first governor elected by the 
votes of the intelligent women of this commonwealth. But, 
I do not want that honor, if to obtain it, it is necessary 
for me to go up and down this state appealing to the preju- 
dices of the people, or making wild and extravagant prom- 
ises which are impossible to fulfill. No matter how beauti- 
ful or how alluring the promises I may make to you here 
today, if you elect me to the governorship and I could not 
deliver the goods, it were far better that I never had 
thought of being your governor. 

I do not promise to reduce your taxes, but I can and do 
promise that if I am elected governor of this state, I will 
to the best of my ability see to it that every dollar of the 
state's money shall be expended honestly and economically 
and that taxes iare held to the lowest possible figure. I do 
promise you that I shall keep out of the public trough the 
cheap politicians, the office hucksters, the tax-eaters and 
the swarm of parasites who throng around the state house 
from the very first day of an administration looking for 
a chance to graft upon the public treasury, because of some 
imaginary political service they may have rendered. 

The professional politician, especially the spoils-seeking 
politician of the Democratic party, which still does business 
on the old spoils-system plan, will always be found fighting 



320 GOVERNIVIENTAL EXTRAVAGANCE 

to maintain the old order of things, fighting to perpetuate 
the game of grab, fighting to keep out those reforms which 
would surely destroy his grip, fighting against open-and- 
above-board, clean-cut, business methods of handling the 
people's business, and he will have his way every time if 
the patriotic citizenship does not wake up and stay awake. 
So I stand for a more practical, a more business-like 
system of state, county, city and township government 
divorced from cheap politics — a system that will simplify 
and consolidate the public business, do away with waste, 
inefficiency and graft, and cut down the expense of con- 
ducting ])iibli(' affairs. 



ROTTEN RECEIVERSHIPS AND DISRESPECT 
FOR LAW 

From (III Address to the State Anti-Horsethief Association, 
Parsons, Kan., January 5, 1916. 

In America — in Kansas — ipore than anywhere else on 
earth, we are l)orn free and equal. But the greatest guar- 
antee of our e(|u ility, of our personal opportunity, and of 
our personal and community rights, is the law. Whenever 
the administration of the law or the enforcement of the 
law is lax, or corrupt, the man who suffers most because 
of this laxness or this corruption is always the poorer man. 
He is the man whose rights we must jealously guard, the 
other man can take pretty good care of himself. If we can 
be reasonably sure that the most defenseless man is getting 
a square deal and a fair show, we can be very certain that 
all is well witli the rest of the world. 

We are convinced that a republic is the best, the fairest, 
the most just, the most advanced form of government on 
earth. We have ample proof of it. We cannot be made 
the victims of petty kings and led to slaughter as have been 



KICKING OFF THE SHACKLES 321 

onr helpless brothers in Europe. For this reason more 
responsibility rests upon every man of us — and in Kansas 
■ — every woman, too. 

In a republic such as ours, no citizen can afford to go 
to sleep in regard to public matters, or become apathetic. 
He must watch his public servants, size-up his public men, 
ruthlessly weed out the unfit, stand for and compel the 
strictest enforcement of law, that even-handed justice be 
done to all men. He must jealously guard his courts, his 
public institutions, and get behind and push every good 
measure and every faithful official. He must think and 
act for himself. Even tho he may and probably will 
make mistakes — if he reads and keeps as well informed as 
he can about public affairs in his neighborhood, his town- 
ship, his county, state and nation, he will much oftener be 
right than wroiig. The great danger lies in procrastinat- 
ing, in putting off these public duties, or neglecting them. 
We have had some terrible reckonings to settle because of 
such neglect. One instance was our Civil War. In our 
more recent recollection the people of this country have 
narrowly escaped becoming mere voting machines because 
powerful interests were virtually in control of our political 
machinery. Fortunately we saw our danger and began 
kicking off the shackles with which we were being bound. 

We have yet plenty of evidence that we are not entirely 
out of tlie clutches of big predatory interests. We still 
have men, and groups of men, who plan and carry out 
lobbying campaigns in state legislatures and in Congress. 
By reason of their great wealth and ' ' working ' ' affiliations 
with other great interests, they are powerful and compel- 
ling and control many channels of influence. They are 
consummately skillful and cunning in using these advan- 
tages to their own ends. 

We still have men of this class, who in the secrecy of 
their private offices, plan with the keenest lawyers, • men 
long trained in such work, how they may violate the law 
and evade its penalties, or weaken or nullify its enforcing. 



322 ROTTEN RECEIVERSHIPS 

These men are the rebate makers, the corporationists who 
lower the price of products to destroy competition; who 
foment strikes in the mills of their competitors; who make 
trade agreements and fix prices; who put up stock-jobbing 
schemes. Tliey are one of the most potent influences in the 
lax enforcement, or the paralysis of law; in the corrupting 
of legislators and public servants. Largely because of their 
machinations, and a public that trusts too much to its serv- 
ants, forgetting that eternal vigilance *is the price of liberty, 
we have come too dangerously near the condition of having 
one law for the rich and another law for the poor. The 
hope of the producer, of the consumer, of the man who 
labors, lies in an aroused and sustained determination on 
the part of every citizen to strengthen our institutions and 
build up respect for law. 

Instead of more thoroly and watchfully doing our 
duty as citizens, in weeding the rascals out, and looking 
after our courts, we have piled up laws to regulate almost 
every abuse, only to have these laws punched full of holes, 
jokered into uselessness, or to start off on one of those 
long legal processions thru the courts by which justice 
usually is tired out. 

"We need courts and judges and a system of jurispru- 
dence that will act with the same promptness as the post- 
office. And they should serve the public as inexpensively 
as possible, for we should make justice so free that the 
poor man will never be debarred from its protection, and 
the law's delays be used to break his back and perpetuate 
an injustice. To face our greatest enemy and save our- 
selves from destruction, our need is more efficient and 
honest judges and other public officials, and a citizenship 
that is constantly on the job. 

In every system of government there are the constructive 
and the destructive elements. The constructive element 
stands for law enforcement without equivocation, or favor, 
in the interest of a square deal for every citizen, rich or 
poor; for an honest, efficient public service that will do 



EXPLOITING THE PEOPLE 323 

uo more for the big citizen and the big corporation than 
it will do for the little citizen and the little corporation; 
for courts that will be stone blind and immovable to every 
issue and consideration save justice. 

The destructive element constantly seeks to exploit the 
people to its own personal advantage, to prostitute courts, 
legislators, the public service and public institutions to its 
own ends regardless of all other consequences. 

Both of these elements have conducted a perpetual war- 
fare in the affairs of men, since history began, and are 
fighting for or against us at this very hour. Our greatest 
weapon of offense and defense is our own political intelli- 
gence, and discussion, and publicity. Our safety lies in 
turning on the light, opening the doors, having all public 
matters done in the open, that the people may have knowl- 
edge of them. Nothing that is straight and square need 
fear the scrutiny of the people. No honest man has any- 
thing to fear from them, and by these means we shall com- 
pel the dishonest public official to become honest. I might 
go even farther and say that the only enemies this country 
need fear already have landed. They are public graft, the 
pork barrel, a decadent and sometimes corrupt legal system 
and the poor management and wasteful conduct of public 
business. 

Perhaps our greatest weakness as a nation is our lack of 
respect for law. This is not to be wondered at when it 
appears that our courts and our great corporations may 
evade and ignore or impede the law with impunity, when- 
ever and wherever they see fit. We have seen, over and 
over again, a fatal paralysis overtake justice when a smart 
lawyer and a long pocketbook were in the case and only- 
law and justice and a smaller pocketbook were on the other 
side to oppose them. 

We have repeatedly seen our courts pay outrageous and 
enormously excessive fees to attorneys and receivers, and 
even to public officials, in receivership cases, altho 
knowing even better than we know that these big fees, 



324 ROTTEN RECEIVERSHIPS 

finally, must come out of the pockets of the people. And 
knowing, even better than we know, that the people can 
neither defend themselves nor run — the chance the high- 
wayman gives them if he holds them up — but many only 
stand and deliver in the name of the law. 

When so little respect is shown for law, for fair play, 
for justice, by the officers and servants of justice, need 
we be surprised to find these things in some cynical dis- 
repute among us as a people? 

When a legal officer of the state may accept an addi- 
tional fee of $8,325 in a receivership for services rendered 
the state, altho the state is at the same time paying him 
a salary in full for his services, why should we expect the 
average man to feel he, too, cannot be a little careless about 
the spirit or the letter of the law whenever it may profit 
him or suit him to feel so? 

I have been impelled to say these things to you because 
of the recent reports made to the Kansas Utilities Commis- 
sion showing the excessive fees paid to lawyers, to receiv- 
ers and to one state official, in the receivership of the Kan- 
sas Natural Gas company. 

By its own plea this is a bankrupt corporation, a public 
utility doing business at a loss and unable longer to supply 
gas to consumers on the terms of its original contract with 
the people of Kansas. 

Yet this presumably failing corporation has been com- 
pelled to deliver nearly $300,000 as fees to receivers and 
attorneys which the gas users, representing a large number 
of the citizens of Kansas, will have to pay. 

We have recent!}^ learned that in the Kansas Natural 
Gas case twenty-ojie lawyers and receivers participated in 
this grab, some of them receiving as high as $22,000. 

Tlie total cost of this brief receivership, which the people 
ultimately will have to pay, is nearly one-third of a million 
dollars! And a court has sanctioned it! 

We now find the state receivers in this case — receivers 



KANSAS NATURAL GAS COMPANY 325 

appointed by a Kansas court — resisting the efforts of the 
state to restore this public utility to service. Instead of 
clearing up the company's difficulties, closing up its af- 
fairs in court, ending the great expense of this litigation, 
and restoring the company to something like normal busi- 
ness efficiency, these receivers are sparring with legal tech- 
nicalities and attempting to prolong the litigation by re- 
turning the company to the federal court where further 
costs and expenses may be piled up. 

Lawyers to right of them. Lawyers to left of them. 
Lawyers in front of them, behind and all around them, 
like a pack of hungry wolves trailing a hamstrung steer, 
this is the position of the Kansas Natural Gas company and 
the people of Kansas. The lawyers by raising "a federal 
question" now have the receivership case in the federal 
courts and further rich picking in fees and emoluments will 
be added to the hundreds of thousands already bled from 
the public. Meantime the whole Middle-West is receiving 
such a lesson on the venality and decadence of some of its 
courts and forms of law that a way to protect the public 
from such betrayal and legalized robbery in future im- 
presses the people as imperative. 

Lawyer's fees in receivership cases are as lawful and 
honorable as the wages of a workingman, says one of the 
receivers in the Kansas Gas deal. 

They are lawful. They also are exorbitant, excessive, 
and extortionate. No workingman ever gets more than the 
scale of his day's wage and in service must render full 
value for that. Nor are twenty-one workmen ever em- 
ployed on any job that two or three can readily perform. 
Big fees in receiverships come within the law, it is true, 
but the public recognizes as unmistakably as ever, never- 
theless, that these fees are a form of legalized graft and 
legalized extortion, and that it is the victim. 

''I feel that two receivers are not necessary. I am an 
operating railroad man, not a lawyer, ' ' wrote H. U. Mudge 



326 KOTTEN RECEIVERSHIPS 

in tendering his resignation to the federal judge who ap- 
pointed him one of the receivers of the Rock Island. 

What do the four receivers and the fifteen assistant 
receivers of the Kansas Natural Gas company think of the 
Mudffe idea? One receiver is enough for a giant corpora- 
uon like the Rock Island, but it took twenty-one legal wet 
nurses to minister to the infant gas company. Mr. Mudge 
IS an expert railroad administrator, there is no higher 
authority on railroads in America. Also he is an expert 
judge of what is actually required of a receiver. 

When a great corporation goes on the rocks, some man 
or group of men has scuttled it. During the reign of law 
and lawlessness in big business, we have seen looted cor- 
porations stagger to their feet and once more become 
healthy and vigorous, only to be robbed again and laid low. 
Tliat day is passing and with it must pass that form of 
legal pillage appropriately called receiverships. It was in- 
tended that bankrupt business should be nursed back to 
health by these officers of the courts, not betrayed, sand- 
bagged, robbed and done to death in the refuge of the law, 
by men posing as friends and preservers. 

While I have condemned^ unsparingly the evil that is 
done in courts, I should be*doing very wrong to intimate, 
or to seem to say, that only evil is done there, for of course 
they do far more good than harm and I do not wish my 
remarks to be construed as a wholesale attack upon them. 
The majority of our courts, I think, are doing their utmost 
to deal out even-handed justice. It is the system that is 
most at fault. It is not infallible and too often a court, 
forgetful of its plain duty to the state and its people, 
stands for these indefensible extravagant receiverships. It 
is these courts that I am condemning. 

But so long as the courts of law make receiverships a 
public license to grab, there will be small respect for the 
administration of law in the United States and no illusions 
about the uncertainties of justice. Both bench and bar 



GRAFT IN THE COURTS 327 

have so frequently and so flagrantly betrayed the highest 
trust a people can delegate to its representatives, that I 
fear it will take a generation of true service to bring back 
the confidence the people once had in their courts and 
judges. 

The judges and attorneys and receivers wlio participate 
in this graft seem to have no sense of decency, no feeling 
of shame when it comes to appropriating money to their 
own use, which they are presumed to hold as a sacred trust. 

The court managing this business is supposed to stand 
guard over the people's interest. Yet, without protest, ac- 
tually with its sanction, it allowed the treasury of the 
bankrupt company to be raided and looted under the guise 
of special services rendered by receivers and attorneys. 

It simply is a species of robbery. Indeed, I have more 
respect for the bank robber or the burglar, who must risk 
his life, than for the public official who hides behind the 
law and participates in this kind of legalized extortion. 

Graft has for too long been permitted to intrench itself 
in our public institutions, in our court houses, in our city 
halls, and — God save the mark — in our courts of justice, 
there openly, shamelessly and brazenly to exact and compel 
tribute from all comers. We must close these avenues of 
easy money where the public is robbed, and quit putting a 
premium on such infamous dishonesty by tamely submit- 
ting to it, by saying or doing nothing to prevent it. 

This outrageous plundering of the public virtually by 
its own servants should not be possible. If our laws are 
inadequate, they must be strengthened. I say to you 
frankly that I propose to use all the power of the governor, 
as long as I am in office, to forever put a stop to these 
get-rich-quick schemes at the expense of the public. 



A POLITICAL PARTY'S DUTY 

From an Address to the Kansas Day Chib, Topeka, Kan., 
January 29, 1915. 

Since I last met with my friends of the Kansas Day 
Club, a great honor, a new and weighty obligation and 
probably the chief place of trial and many troubles has 
come to me. I shall try mightily not to disappoint the peo- 
ple of Kansas who have bestowed upon me this great honor, 
not- the Republicans of Kansas who gave me my splendid 
majority. 1 recognize the great debt I owe to the Repub- 
lican party — the party of which I have been proud to be 
a member all my life — and I am sincere in my desire 
and intention to advance by every means in my power the 
great priiiciples for which the Republican party has al- 
ways stood. 

But. speaking to you Republicans of Kansas, as Republi- 
can to Republicans, as Kansan to Kansans, I feel that I am 
but voicing the wisli in your heart when I tell you, with 
all tlie sincerity and all the earnestness at my command, 
tliat the better Republican I am, the more closely we Re- 
pul)licans now in control of the state government can fol- 
low the political ideals of Abraham Lincoln and the foun- 
ders of our party of Liberty and Justice, and the nearer 
we shall come to giving the people of Kansas a clean, decent, 
honest, economical administration of public affairs, and the 
nearer we sliall come to assuring an equal opportunity and 
an absolutely square deal in every department of life to 
every mm, woman and child within the borders of our 
state — then, my fellow Republicans, we shall best serve our 
party by best serving our state. 

I believe we Republicans all have, somewhere within us, 

328 



LEADERSHIP OF KANSAS REPUBLICANS 329 

a deep and patriotic purpose — each in his own way as light 
and opportunity is given him — to promote the good name 
and fame of Kansas by further perfecting its government 
and its institutions so that the people may make that ma- 
terial and moral and spiritual progress toward high effi- 
ciency, thrift and right living that makes a state and its 
people truly great and truly happy. To such a people is 
given leadership among peoples, a greater part, a greater 
honor, a greater destiny in the world and a greater influ- 
ence among the states of the Union. 

Kansas Republicans have shown such leadership as this 
in many things, and for almost half a century. We have 
a magnificent record of advanced, progressive, constructive 
legislation. We have in the state house today what I be- 
lieve to be one of the most sane, most capable, most indus- 
trious lawmaking bodies ever assembled in Kansas. I be- 
lieve the legislative department of the state government is 
conscientiously and earnestly trying to keep faith with the 
people. I earnestly hope we are going to get results. I am 
myself deeply interested in every measure which will pro- 
mote efficiency and economy in state and local government. 
We don 't want to be stingy ; we don 't want to cripple any 
state institution, but this is the year of all years to apply 
the pruning knife to extravagant and unnecessary appro- 
priations, to eliminate every useless board and every use- 
less inspector, and all unnecessary jobs of every kind and 
description. 

Therefore, as a citizen, and as a Republican, and as a 
public servant, I ask for your faithful and loyal support 
in the effort we are making to put Kansas well to the front 
in the forward-looking movement toward better govern- 
ment, more economical government, and toward a more 
efficient, more conscientious public service, the key to all 
future progress. 

I ask your assistance as Kansans and as Republicans to 
help Kansas and the Kansas people to a finer statesman- 
ship and a greater statehood. It is not a one-man's job, 



330 A POLITICAL PARTY'S DUTY 

uor a Imndred men's task, but a responsibility that rests 
on all of us, and I have the utmost faith that Kansas Re- 
public. .ns are not going to shirk that responsibility. 

Without any reference to my personal part in it, I want 
to congratulate you Republicans and the people of Kansas 
upon the far-reaching effect of the recent state election. 
The results were far more important than the mere election 
to office of any individual or set of individuals. 

As Republicans we have reason to rejoice that we have 
demonstrated our ability to iron out our differences of 
opinion and unite once more under the banner of the party 
of progress and patriotism. 

We have reason to rejoice that the people of Kansas 
have showii that they still have faith in the eternal prin- 
ciples which have ever been the guiding star of the Re- 
publican party, and have renewed their allegiance to the 
party that brought Kansas into the world, mothered her 
thru the dark and trying days of her infancy, and by 
wise and patriotic and loving care, has brought her thus 
far in her glorious career. The future never gave brighter 
promise. We are in position to enter the campaign of 1916 
— of which last November's "battle was only the preliminary 
skirmish — with full confidence of rolling up next year an 
old time Republican majority for a Republican President 
and eight Republican members of Congress from Kansas. 



THE PORK BARREL. 

From a Speech at Americus Farmers Union, July 28, 1916. 

Our highest-priced luxury in this country is the public 
"pork" barrel. Every year, every day, every hour, it is 
costing us nearly as much as the actual necessary expenses 
of government. It has made our public service from top to 
bottom, from township to state, from state to nation, the 



. EXCESSIVE APPEOPRIATIONS KEDUCED 331 

most wasteful, the most extravagant, the most expensive 
public service in the world, with the possible exception of 
graft-ridden Russia. Almost half our state and national 
funds are openly dissipated, squandered, thrown away, in 
the colossal system of bribery and vote-buying called the 
pork barrel, and it isn't even given so hard a name as 
stealing. 

A Congressman, a Senator, a legislator of the state wishes 
to please the people in a certain part of his district. How 
does he do it? He arranges to give them large sums of 
money at every session of Congress or of the legislature, 
and a particularly large sum if it is a campaign year. He 
doesn't give it to them out of hand, of course, nor out of 
his own pocket, which would be against the law. He gets 
it out of the public funds raised by taxation. He either 
gets far too big an appropriation for some public institu- 
tion, or public enterprise in his district; or if he hasn't such 
an enterprise or institution, he begins logrolling, lobbying, 
swapping his vote for the votes of his fellow members until 
they vote with him to establish one. Henceforth this is his 
"pork." All he has to do thereafter is to vote for their 
poi:k schemes and they will vote for his. And so the pork 
barrel grows. 

Two years ago, among other things, the pork barrel gave 
us a rivers and harbors bill at Washington of 100 millions. 
Only newspaper attacks from North and South prevented 
its passage at that figure.- It gave us a public buildings 
bill of 45 millions. In Kansas pork legislation led to 
greater appropriations than any legislature had ever passed 
before. I was severely criticised in some quarters for cut- 
ting these appropriations a quarter of a million dollars, 
which was the full extent I was empowered by law to cut 
them. But I would do it again today, or tomorrow, and 
every day, so long as these appropriations needed pruning ; 
for we never shall learn to spend public money well and 
carefully in this country until we are compelled to make a 



332 THE PORK BAEREL 

public dollar work as hard as a private dollar, and one way 
for us to learn this is to limit, not increase the number of 
dollars. 

It is pork, more than anything else, that makes state and 
national appropriations continue to pile up. Pork gave us 
a billion dollar Congress years before we actually needed 
one. Pork builds $60,000 postoffice buildings in $5,000 
to^^^ls. It gives us a small army at the price of a big one. 
It gives us a third or fourth rate navy at the price of a 
first-class one. Pork welcomes and insistently urges larger 
and larger appropriations for army and navy, for pre- 
paredness, and for everything else while recklessly squan- 
dering the plenty it has. Pork has made it cost us $20,000 
to make a soldier at West Point, and $11,000 to educate a 
sailor at Annapolis. Pork squanders millions of millions 
of public funds uselessly decade after decade and insist- 
ently demands more and still more. 

The remedy is a budget system which will authorize the 
executive to present to the legislature a carefully prepared 
schedule of the needs of the-»6tate — a schedule that cannot 
be increased by the legislature. With a budget system, 
running expenses, maintenance charges and estimates of 
needed improvements, will vary no more than they do in 
any well-conducted business, where the same authority is 
given to the executive to disallow or approve them as is 
given to the manager of every big business. This kind of 
a system will come just as soon as the people earnestly 
demand it, but it never will come until they do. This is 
one of tlie things I am working for in Kansas and want 
you to help me get. 



TOO MUCH NEEDLESS LEGISLATION 

From an Address at the Home-Coming Celebration at Esk- 
ridge, Kan., August 12, 1915. 

There should be far more restraint in the creation of 
needless legislation. We have actual need of very little 
new legislation, from time to time, and that should be con- 
structive legislation. And this new legislation should be 
most carefully studied and its probable effect understood, 
before it is passed. Furthermore, the meaning of every 
ncM' statute should be so plainly, so simply and so directly 
expressed, that anyone may read and understand it. Our 
people must be spared this constant flood of confusing, 
contradictory, ridiculous and unnecessary laws. 

It is to the credit of the recent legislature that it probably 
killed more bills than any similar body ever did in Kansas 
in the same length of time. Yet it passed 418 new laws. 
It passed 106 of them in the last 24 hours of the session. 

Think of going it blind in this fashion, of the enormity, 
of the recklessness, of — I might almost say — the criminality 
— of legislating in this manner. How many members, do 
you suppose, knew what they were voting for? 

How often do we find a personal motive or a private 
interest prompting the introducing of a bill ; how often do 
we find members voting with small regard to the intent or 
effect of a measure ; with the result that hastily-drawn, 
illy-considered, illy-advised measures are enacted into laws, 
cumber our statute books, breed litigation, and work hard- 
ships to a patient and long-suffering people. 

I am a believer in the efficacy of law. But "all govern- 
ments derive their just powers from the people ' ' ; and all 
law should be, and must be if it be effective, the expression 

333 



334 TOO MUCH NEEDLESS LEGISLATION 

of the will of the governing people. Our laws which have 
as the object the abolition of vice and crime, never will 
rise in their intent and efficiency above the moral standards 
of the people. 

As long as we, as individuals, look upon the brothel and 
the redlight district as a necessary evil ; as long as we think 
prohibition possible in rural Kansas but impossible in our 
great cities ; as long as we look upon petty grafts and favor- 
itism as a necessary incident of the administration of public 
affairs; as long as we are indifferent to public morals and 
the enforcement of law — just so long are we going to have 
vice and crime and graft and all their attendant penalties. 

You cannot relegate law enforcement and public morals 
and public efficiency altogether to your public officials, 
be they ever so capable and conscientious. Your civic duty 
is not confined to election day nor to the voting booth. 
You can't be a good citizen and confine your good citizen- 
ship to one day a year, any more than you can be a good 
Christian and confine your Christianity to one day a week. 
Kansas needs and America ngpds 365-day-a-year patriots. 
The forces of crime, the forces of vice, the forces of graft 
and corruption are on the job from January 1 until mid- 
night on December 31. They never tire. They never sleep. 
We need men and women who are just as much in earnest, 
just as active, jnst as persevering, and just as determined 
for good government, for decency, for righteousness, as are 
our enemies determined for the overthrow of those things 
which exalt a nation. 

I do not think we can find anywhere else on the face of 
the earth a million and three-quarters of people who will 
grade up so well ; who are so responsive to the demands of 
decency and fairness, who have a greater respect for law 
or a moj'e sincere rlesire for its enforcement. I believe the 
people of Kansas stand for law enforcement without fear 
or favor, without prejudice to any locality, or any indi- 
vidual, or any class. 

It has been demonstrated in Kansas that the cities which 



SALOONS INCREASE PUBLIC DEBTS 335 

have received no revenue from vice have a lower tax rate 
than those cities which in the old days stuck to the last to 
the license-fining system. In this country our greatest 
public debt-maker has been the saloon and the saloon license. 
They have also been our greatest tax on thrift and pros- 
perity. We now have in Kansas the finest retail business 
in the United States as one of the many benefits resulting 
from the enforcement of our prohibitory law. The strictest 
enforcement of this law is undoubtedly our best policy, and 
I know that a majority of the business men of Kansas hold 
that view. A strict and unremitting enforcement of the 
law is not only the best policy, but is best for the happiness 
of your people and best for the sobriety of your city, I 
assure you that this administration w^ill do everything in 
its power to assist in the enforcement of this law. 

Your effort today must be to keep up the good fight — 
to bring into united and concerted action all who are earn- 
estly intent on combating the evils that curse the world, 
and who would speed the progress of decency and purity 
and justice and peace and righteousness and brotherhood 
among men. 



INEFFICIENT STATE GOVERNMENT 

From a Labor Day Address, Columbus, Kan., Sept. 6, 1915. 

While the primary idea of unionism may have been the 
simple matter of greater justice between the employe and 
the employer, the securing of better wages, shorter hours, 
and better conditions for the laborer, I think the larger 
idea of unionism has expanded far beyond that. The union 
probably has no place in partisan politics; but union men, 
as all laboring men, are intensely interested in "politics" 
in its broad and true sense. Your interest in the biennial 
sessions of the state legislature, your interest in the sessions 
of Congress, are not confined merely to the securing of the 



336 INEFFICIENT STATE GOVERNMENT 

passage of some pet measure, or some piece of special legis- 
lation which is going to benefit you and your fellow work- 
men. Your interest is deeper and broader than that. You 
must concern yourself as a good citizen and as a good union 
man, with every problem that confronts the people of Kan- 
sas and the American people as a whole. You are vitally 
interested in every phase of your state government ; because 
the enormous waste, the reckless extravagance, the wicked 
graft which so often characterize the administration of gov- 
ernment, are all direct taxes upon you and your pocketbook. 
You pay the cost of graft and inefficiency and extrava- 
gance. You may not be able to put your finger on the time 
or the manner of the payment, but none the less it is the 
producers who are compelled to foot the bill. 

I am not a croaker. I have never been a muckraker. 
Neither am I blind to the abuses that have crept into our 
governmental system. No man who is honest with himself 
can deny that in many respects our present system is crim- 
inally wasteful and woefully inefficient. I am glad, how- 
ever, to believe that the intelligence and conscience of 
America is finally aroused and that the American people 
are going to right some of the mistakes we have made in 
the past. To me the most interesting feature of the recent 
conference of governors at Boston which I attended, was 
the discussion of the high cost of state government and the 
methods best adapted to conducting the public business in 
an economical and efficient manner. An entire day was 
given to this subject. It developed that more than half the 
states of the Union are studying the wastefulness, ineffi- 
ciency and irresponsibility of the present system of state 
government and are proposing remedies. 

The cause of the trouble undoubtedly is fundamental. 
It was conceded by everyone at the conference that the 
present organization of the state's business relations and 
activities is antiquated, cumbersome, unsound and contrary 
to all good business methods. The result of this inefficient 
and unbusinesslike organization is extravagance and waste- 



CENTRALIZE ADMINISTRATIVE AUTHORITY 337 

fulness in the expenditure of the people's money; a multi- 
tude of disconnected, unaffiliated departments, bureaus 
and boards, often unnecessary, and over which neither the 
governor nor the legislature nor the people have effective 
control. There is duplication of positions and salaries for 
the benefit of political grafters and incompetents; work 
poorly done ; too many useless boards and inspectors ; fail- 
ure to fix and concentrate responsibility ; failure to get 
before the legislature all the facts essential to appropria- 
tions and legislation; and excessive appropriations due to 
local clamor for public plunder and pork barrel politics in 
legislatures. We have these conditions in Kansas, and I 
find many other states cursed in the same manner. 

Suggestions were offered at the Boston conference which 
go to the very root of state government, and which I believe 
are absolutely essential in carrying out any genuine econ- 
omy and reform in finances and efficiency in administra- 
tion. It was the opinion of the governors that the remedy 
lies in the wider use of the well known methods and the 
well tried mechanism which have proved successful in great 
business concerns ; a more effective centralizing of admin- 
istrative authority in the executive which will afford him 
a better opportunity to maintain constant scrutiny of pub- 
lie funds; and the vesting in the governor of the power of 
originating the legislative budget of appropriations. 

The governor is popularly supposed to be the leader in 
the execution of public policies, and the people hold him 
directly responsible, but in most states, Kansas included, 
the executive is greatly handicapped so far as effective 
leadership, responsibility and administrative control are 
concerned. The executive work in the government of Kan- 
sas is divided among nearly one hundred departmental 
officers, boards and commissions, having administrative 
duties with slight provision for co-ordination and with less 
provisions for executive direction anl control. Many of 
these departments and bureaus are as independent of the 
governor as they are of the President of the United States. 



338 INEFFICIENT STATE GOVERNMENT 

These boards constantly can interfere with the minutest 
details of state administration without assuming any open 
responsibility for its success. 

Any partisan board of opposite political faith is given 
every inducement to play politics and make trouble for the 
administration, and has every opportunity at hand it could 
wish for, if it desires to balk reforms or discredit the ad- 
ministration or the policies of any governor. 

The great weakness of this system which scatters author- 
ity among mcUiy boards and bureaus is that it leaves no 
one solely concerned with or responsible for the actual 
handling and management of the state's finances or for all 
the business of the state. Effective overhead control is 
impossible. Every officer, bureau and institution is nat- 
urally engaged in getting larger appropriations for his par- 
ticular department. Every board and department is con- 
stantly seeking to enlarge its operations, but there is no 
one official solely concerned with cutting appropriations 
and expenditures and holding all public officers to account. 
Under such a system no governor can rightly be held wholly 
responsible for cheeking waste, extravagance, and ineffi- 
ciency. No wonder, then, that appropriations grow larger 
year by year and that cost of government is increasing con- 
stantly, as long as these departments may act independently 
of any central executive. There should be opportunity for 
constant and informed criticism and scrutiny by the execu- 
tive. All the departments should work immediately under 
the governor 's ej^e at the problems of raising and disbursing 
state finances, the employment of men and women for state 
M'ork, the purchase of supplies and other property used by 
the state, and in every possible way to keep him thoroly 
informed as to the state of the public business. 

AVe greatly need, too, a budget system of appropriations 
that will enable the governor, if he is to be held responsible 
for the cost of government, to submit to the legislature in 
advance of its meeting, intelligent estimates of revenues 
and expenditures based upon carefully prepared data with 



CHECKING THE WASTE 339 

opportunity given to the legislature to reduce and strike 
out appropriations. 

I am still as firmly convinced as I was when I said to 
the people in my inaugural address, that we shall not be 
able to check the waste of state revenues until we have 
reorganized and responsive machinery that will bring sim- 
plicity, efficiency and economy thru centralizing respon- 
sibility and authority. 



THE GOLDEN RULE IN BUSINESS. 

From an Address to the Business Men's Efficiency Conven- 
tion at Wichita, Kan., Jan. 11, 1916. 

I might spend all my time here this evening showing 
you that a governor under our present system is a very 
limited official, except when it comes to taking the blame. 
There is no limit to him there. He is pretty sure to be tlie 
goat, the scapegoat and buffer for everything that is not 
well done in the name of the state, and in regard to many 
of these things he has as much actual control as a notary 
public. 

But I have not come down here to talk on that subject. 
Nor would I have you think that I am complaining about 
my job. I wasn't looking for any soft snap when I took 
it, nor expecting to find matters much different than I 
have found them. But I am striving to do this : I am 
striving to do everything in my power to bring about cer- 
tain changes and reforms in our system and methods, so 
that Kansas can furnish machinery which will enable a 
governor, if he has a genuine desire to do so, to get the 
maximum of results for good. And let me tell you when 
things are lined up right in our system of public service, 
as at no greatly remote day I am confident they will be — 
by and with the support of a fully informed and intelligent 



3-40 THE GOLDEN RULE IN BUSINESS 

people — you are going to see the highest type of govern- 
mental efficiency in the world in the land that we live in 
and love. 

We have the stuff in us to work out our destiny and lead 
the world to happier, better things, and I am satisfied we 
are going to do it sooner or later. What interests you and 
me is making sure that we shall not fail now to do our 
share. It is we who are in the harness. It is we who are 
doing the world's work today, and what an unfinished 
world it is. 

I congratulate you on the fact that on every hand we find 
today the positive manifestation of the new spirit born of 
the quiet revolution that is permeating the whole business 
world ; the definite acceptance of the new commercial philo- 
sophy that the Golden Rule pays and that truth and moral- 
ity are the most profitable business tenets. 

Truth is the central idea around which this great national 
movement in business is organized ; the principle that hon- 
esty and morality are as essential to substantial commercial 
progress as tliey are to personal character. 

Unquestionably the tendency of modern business is more 
and more in the direction of fair dealing and open-handed 
methods. The business man, the same as the public officer, 
is ceasing to skate on thin ice ; more and more now he is 
asking himself, "Is this proposed transaction right and 
proper, as between man and man?" rather than "Can I 
put it over and keep out of the clutches of the law?" An 
aroused public conscience which is becoming increasingly 
insistent demands that the business world, newspapers as 
well as merchants, shall deal with the public as devoted, 
faithful servants of that public. It has made service the 
dominant note in modern business; has brought about a 
contempt of unclean methods, and an appreciation of the 
great truth tliat more and better business can be done upon 
the basis of the utmost good faith between buyer and seller. 

Not so many years ago advertising, for instance, was to 
a more or less extent, a system of deceit and misrepresenta- 



THE DUTY OF NEWSPAPERS 341 

tion. The low moral standard that prevailed in business 
was tacitly expressed in the warning, ' ' The buyer must look 
out for himself." A purchase was more like an old-fash- 
ioned horse trade, a contest of wits between buyer and 
seller, neither of whom had any compunctions about deceiv- 
ing the other. Newspapers frequently published advertise- 
ments that were false, misleading and harmful, and it was 
left to the reader to sort the truth from the lies. It is dif- 
ferent now. Conditions are not ideal, to be sure, but the 
best newspapers and business houses are "cleaning up." 
The whole character of advertising and business is rapidly 
changing. The standards of morality in the world of trade 
have advanced materially. The merchant has found that 
there is a higher purpose and a better profit than misbe- 
gotten dollars ; that it pays from every viewpoint to tell 
the truth and win a permanent customer. 

And there is a deep-rooted and growing desire on the 
part of the publishers, to accept the moral responsibility 
which unquestionably attaches itself to such a popular edu- 
cator as the newspaper ; a firmer conviction that the news- 
papers, acknowledged to be the most influential persuasive 
force in the country for exposing vice, for reproving recre- 
ant servants, for exhorting the people to recognize their 
civic responsibilities, must themselves come before the peo- 
ple with clean hands ; that we who seek to lead the public 
should be heedful of our own footsteps; that we should 
practice what we preach ; that our ethical purposes should 
be high and our business methods above criticism. I 
find a growing determination among the best newspapers 
thruout the country to eliminate the imtruthful, the 
unclean and the dishonest from advertising and they have 
the hearty approval of the honest merchants. Conscious 
that it is their duty to protect the people against the de- 
signs of the advertising faker, the bogus mail promoter, the 
vender of harmful remedies, or the dishonest merchant, they 
will no longer accept advertising that is damaging to the 
physical, financial or moral conditions of tlieir readers; but 



342 THE GOLDEN RULE IN BUSINESS 

will give the reader the truth in their advertising columns 
with the same fidelity that it is given in the news columns. 
And this helps honest business. 

Public confidence is the one asset without which no mer- 
chant can succeed. Talking thru the medium of the 
daily press to tens of thousands of people is one of the 
greatest of all modern privileges, therefore a man's adver- 
tising should be as sincere as his personal correspondence, 
as inviolable as his signed contract. 

I rejoice that the newspaper is inspired as never before 
with the determination to do service ; that it has become 
one of the most effective instruments for the advancement 
of American civilization thru industry and commerce, 
and is leading in the great ethical impulse that is abroad 
in the world today. The world is growing better; we are 
upon the threshold of a greater jera in which honesty and 
good faith and brotherhood are the controlling forces, an 
era in which the spirit of the Golden Rule will dominate 
the business world to an extent not dreamed of by the saints 
and prophets of the past. 



NEED OF BUSINESS MEN IN POLITICS. 

From an Address to the Leavenworth Commercial Club, 
April 13, 1915. 

Now, if ever, is the time for every business man in 
Kansas and the United States to keep track of the record 
of public officials. Spot the fellows who are ready and 
willing to waste public funds by favoring needless expendi- 
tures or unnecessary appropriations. Keep your eye on 
the pork-barrel crowd and all others actuated by selfish 
motives who are more interested in their own welfare than 



PUBLIC OFFICE A PUBLIC TRUST 343 

in the welfare of the country as a whole. They are dan- 
gerous men. Mark them and weed them out. 

The people of Kansas demand something more than com- 
mon honesty in their public officials. 

It isn't enough for a man merely to keep his fingers out 
of the public treasury. It isn't enough for him to keep 
within the limit of the law and keep out of jail. The faith- 
ful public servant must have honesty of the positive sort 
as well as the negative sort. To be sure, he must refrain 
from graft and loot, but he must do more than that if he 
is to measure up to the modern standard of honesty; he 
must be a faithful public servant — and that means he must 
render the best service of which he is capable. He must 
realize that it is just as wrong to steal the state's time as 
it is to steal the state's money; just as wrong to waste the 
state's money by carelessness or thru extravagance as 
it is to appropriate the public funds to his own use; just 
as wicked to pay public funds to a useless job-holder as it 
would be to put the money into his own pocket. 

I have a great deal of faith in the common honesty of 
mankind. But the trouble has been that too many of us 
have had very lax ideas about the public service. We have 
been too prone to take it for granted that a public contract 
is a " fat contract. ' ' We have been accustomed to look upon 
public office as an "easy snap," and we have been in the 
habit of distributing the offices as rewards for political 
service, or have elected men because they were "good fel- 
lows," without regard to their qualifications. And the 
result often has been poor public service — not always be- 
cause of positive rascality, but more frequently because of 
inefficiency, extravagance and wastefulness in the conduct 
of public affairs. 

Locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen, 
is the only recourse the people have under the spoils system 
of government. This is what a taxpayers' league is now 
trying to do in Kansas City and Jackson county, Missouri. 
The league finds the city and county has 472 deputy offi- 



344 BUSINESS MEN IN POLITICS 

cials on the payroll, many officials being provided with 
motor cars and chauffeurs at the public expense. It finds 
great wastefulness in the building of rock roads ; the crea- 
tion of many altogether unnecessary offices to make places 
for political favorites — in other words, that a great, waste- 
ful, political machine is doing the public's business poorly, 
inefficiently and extravagantly, while doing the public 
thoroly. 

An easy-going man in business seldom proves successful. 
Success in business requires the most constant and close 
attention to detail and faithful, earnest and interested in- 
dustry. The man must be on the job all the time. And this 
is the very reason our politico-management of the public 
business is such a complete and colossal failure that it is 
costing the people enormous sums every year out of all 
proportion to the benefits they receive. The public servant 
must learn that his job depend^ solely on the way he does 
his Avork and not on his political pull, before one in a thou- 
sand will be worth his salt. Not until we insist on divorcing 
the public business from partisan politics, political intrigue 
and the spoils idea and concentrating the responsibility and 
the management of it under the fewest possible heads, in- 
stead of dividing it up among many independent depart- 
ments, will the public get its dollar's worth of service for 
its hundred cents of tax money. 

The people of Kansas, and indeed the people of the na- 
tion, are taking a higher stand in regard to public affairs 
til an ever before, and much good already has been accom- 
plished. But we are still a long way from conducting the 
public business on as careful and as economical basis as 
that on which the successful private business is conducted. 

It seems to me that common honesty should impel every 
man who takes an oatli of office to bring to that office the 
best there is in him. It seems to me that it should be his 
highest ambition to conduct his office on a business-like 



MORE CENTRALIZATION NEEDED 345 

basis — to give the public the greatest possible service at the 
least possible expense. 

We must demand from every public official just as strict 
economy, just as great watchfulness and carefulness, just 
as great efficiency and just as scrupulous honesty in "little 
things" — the saving of the minutes and the pennies — as 
the modern business house demands of its employes. 

As a business man to business man, I am here to say to 
you good men of Kansas that what we need most in this 
country, what we must have, and what we are soon to get, 
is more business in our politics and in our public affairs. 
This now is our greatest lack in government, the reason 
why w^e have the poorest, the loosest, the most inefficient 
and the most expensive public service, from top to bottom, 
of any first-class nation on earth. 

Our present system of public service was born in the 
days of the stage coach and the blunderbuss. It is utterly 
incapable of keeping step with the quick march of modern 
progress. Every year it is falling farther and farther be- 
hind. It is so inefficient and unmanageable in its methods, 
that thru its o^vn inadvertence it frequently defeats its 
own good purposes and invariably brings keen disappoint- 
ment to the people. The remedy lies in the wider use of 
the well known methods and the well tried mechanism which 
have proved successful in great business concerns; a more 
effective centralization of administrative authority in the 
executive which will afford him a better opportunity to 
maintain constant scrutiny of public funds ; and the vesting 
in the governor of the power of originating the legislative 
budget of appropriations. 

In every community the men of finest executive ability 
and of greatest influence on its life and progress are the 
business men. I don 't believe they have, or that the people 
have, any conception of what we are losing, thru not 
having the active personal interest and assistance of these 
men in making the pulilic business a business. 

As a state, we must follow the example set by the great 



346 BUSINESS MEN IN POLITICS 

railway systems and business corporations in adopting mod- 
ern scientific business methods; in the elimination of useless 
boards and commissions and all other unnecessary positions 
and in requiring the very highest efficiency on the part of 
every public servant. Both county and state government 
in Kansas can be greatly simplified by concentrating re- 
sponsibility, by reorganizing and consolidating some of the 
offices, eliminating a lot of the useless boards, commissions, 
inspectors, and other unnecessary positions, and requiring 
the very highest efficiency on the part of every public 
servant. 

The state's welfare and the people's good is the business 
of state government, not apportioning out the jobs to vote- 
getters, or to pay political debts, or to buy another's good 
will. 

The man who gets a state j©b or any other public posi- 
tion should be the best man it is possible to obtain for the 
money. Merit should be the first test of his fitness, and 
merit should be the chief requirement for his retention in 
office. 

The cost of government in the state of Kansas and the 
country over has almost doubled in the last ten years. We 
are not only living beyond our means, we are living beyond 
the means of the third or fourth generation to come. 

This all has to be paid some time — if not in direct taxes, 
then indirectly. And the end is not yet. The whole Amer- 
ican public seems wild with spending. "We are living high, 
in the family, in the town, as a state and as a nation. 

If the public 's money supply were as inexhaustible as air, 
as so many agitators try to make it appear in urging appro- 
priations in Kansas legislatures as well as in the national 
Congress, the result would not be so serious, but we must 
forever keep in mind that the government — national, state 
and local — has nothing to give except what it collects by 
taxation, and this burden falls heaviest on the man at the 



MUST STOP EECKLESS EXPENDITURES 347 

end of the line, and on business. We must not forget that 
you and I always pay the bill in the end. 

The government, as well as the state, the county and the 
city, must stop spending money recklessly and wastefully. 
Battleships, rivers and harbors, monuments, public build- 
ings, expositions — in these and almost everything else there 
has been shameful extravagance. Congressmen of all polit- 
ical parties in recent years actually have urged indefensible 
million-dollar appropriations just because the graft was to 
be spent in their own states — have boasted of their raids 
on the public treasury when the whole thing was ruinous, 
and disgraceful, and a betrayal of the public welfare. The 
extreme has been reached in public expenditures and I 
believe immediate retrenchment is necessary to insure the 
future welfare of the people who are bearing the great 
burden. 



NARROW PARTISANSHIP IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 

From a Speech Delivered at the Spring Hill Fair, 
September 8, 1916. 

It is not pleasant for me to say these things. Some of 
the men who have participated in these gas receivership 
grafts are members of my own political party. They have 
many and powerful friends. But, when I became a public 
officer, I took a vow that I should serve all the people of 
Kansas alike in respect to doing my duty, and I shall not 
depart from that vow nor from my duty to shield wrong- 
doing, whether in my own party or some other party. 

More than that. I am glad to see that as a people and 
a state we are getting a little farther away all the time 
from blind and narrow partisanship in public affairs. The 
day when we can get anywhere by approving or defending 
every man and every measure of our own party and sweep- 
ingly condemning everything and everybody in the other 



348 PARTIZANSHIP IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS 

party, is past, and we should be botH glad and proud of it, 
for it is proof — unmistakable proof — of our higher political 
intelligence as a people. 

Every man should belong to a political party — the party 
that most nearly represents his views — and should take a 
lively interest in politics. I belong to the Republican party 
and I believe heartily in its principles. But personally, 
as an editor, and officially as governor, I propose to stand 
by every man and every measure, truly serving the people, 
whether politically they are Democrats or Republicans. I 
am glad too, to be able to say of the people of this state, 
that while we Kansans have positive political views, espe- 
cially in campaign times, we are becoming more and more 
inclined to get down to the real business of government 
through genuine public service. That more and more we 
are turning our serious attention to promoting human pro- 
gress and humanitarian ideas. That more and more we 
are considering the -welfare and advancement of the whole 
people. That is the true test. That is the real thing, the 
big thing, the vital thing — the only thing worth doing in 
party politics. 



REPUBLICANISM THE HOPE OF THE NATION 

From an Address at a RepuhUcan Banquet at Hiawatha, 
Kan., February 22, 1916. 

It is like meeting home folks to come to Brown county. 
In a high sense Kansas has no finer type of sturdy Repub- 
lican citizenship than you have always had here. It is the 
kind of Republicanism that puts home and country first 
and party next. I say this in no disparagement of party 
faith and party loyalty, but in praise of it. The welfare 
of the community and the nation is the true object of party 
politics and party solicitude. The community, the common- 



REPUBLICAN PRINCIPLES ARE SOUND 349 

wealth and the nation were not created that there might 
be a Republican party, a Democratic party, or any other 
party, but thru party organization and party activity, 
to prove and develop American ideals and American insti- 
tutions and to promote human progress and the world's 
happiness and well-being — the biggest and the grandest job 
God has delegated to man. And if ever there was a time 
M^hen a man might fervently thank God ■that he was and 
still is a Republican, it seems to me that it is now. 

I am a thoro believer in the principles of the Repub- 
lican party. I am not a Republican simply because some 
otlier man was a Republican last year, and another is a 
Republican this year, but because the Republican party 
more than any other is animated by the American spirit 
and always has upheld our national self-respect at home 
and abroad. It has done this not by threats, nor bluster, 
but in tlie fair, firm, kindly and dignified way character- 
istic of America's true attitude toward the world, and in 
accord with our Christian belief in the brotherhood of man. 
Under Republican administration, an immense navy and a 
huge army never have been required to firmly enforce such 
demands, nor do I think they ever will be. 

We have seen such lamentable blundering and shifting 
about of policies in the case of Mexico that the world has 
wondered and as a consequence, nowhere has the life and 
property of American citizens and the honor of American 
womanhood been held so cheaply as in Mexican territory. 
Here the same indecision has by its results obscured and 
discredited certain admirable features of the President's 
policy. 

Coming nearer home the weak spots in the Wilson ad- 
ministration are even more apparent. There has been no 
greater failure in American history than the Underwood 
tariff. Immense revenues have been lost, the cost of living 
has not been perceptibly decreased, American labor has suf- 
fered severely, shiploads of farm products from all the 



350 THE HOPE OF THE NATION 

agricultural countries of the globe have undersold home 
products in the American market. 

To meet its immense losses of revenue and keep the na- 
tional treasury'- from utter bankruptcy, the Democratic ad- 
ministration was compelled to supplement its tax on in- 
comes with the so-called war tax in time of peace ; and now, 
more than a year after its enactment and the extension of 
this war tax for the present year, the government is exceed- 
ing its income at the rate of about 1 million dollars every 
three days and piling up a deficit of 100 million or more 
of doll irs a year. Had it not been for war in Europe, 
which put all foreign competition with American trade, at 
home and abroad, out of commission ; which has kept us 
busy suppl.ying the belligerent nations with foodstuffs and 
clothing; Avhich has kept the millions of capital of our 
great money lenders busy ; and has brought and is bringing 
to our steel mills and munitioi? makers 2 million dollars a 
day of blood money for arms and munitions alone — the 
wreck of American industry resulting from the operation 
of the Congress-made, unscientific Democratic tariff act 
undoubted! V' would h;'.ve been appalling, and the statesman- 
ship of the Democratic party so utterly discredited before 
the people, that its retirement from power would be de- 
manded from Maine to California. 

I am confident that after the war, should the Democratic 
party still be in power, we shall once more begin to feel the 
ruinous effect of this misbegotten tariff as we did in the 
few months preceding the war, when, as you know, trade 
balances ran against us month after month and gold began 
to leave the countrj^ by the shipload. 

The first act of the Democratic tariff tinkerers was to 
do away with a tariff commission which the experience of 
the Republican party had amply demonstrated was the only 
honest, scientific, equitable and logical way of adjusting 
tariff schedules. It went further than this: In following 
its theory of a tariff for revenue only, the Democratic party 
swept aside the protective principle, now adopted and en- 



DEMOCRATS MAKE MANY MISTAKES 351 

forced by all otlier commercial nations, to discover in a 
few short weeks that its tariff act was failing even as a 
revenue producer and that the party's new income tax 
was not bringing money in fast enough to fill up the gaping 
hole in the treasury. 

In the meantime this costly Democratic experiment has 
cost the American people hundreds of millions of dollars 
and probably would have brought them near ruin but for 
the war, which, altho it has visited grief and destruction 
on Europe has undoubtedly saved us from a widespread 
industrial disaster. 

The Republican party has made mistakes, but it has 
never made such costly errors as have repeatedly been made 
by the Democratic party whenever returned to power. The 
Republican party has always managed the business of the 
government at a profit instead of at a loss. It has always 
provided a tariff that has protected the American producer 
and the American wage earner and has supplied sufficient 
funds with which to pay the running expenses of govern- 
ment without levying special or extraordinary taxes for 
that purpose. Its history proves the Republican party to 
have been the only political party in this country in the 
last half century with brains enough, with statesmanship 
enough, and with executive and cohesive power enough to 
capably administer the affairs of the nation. It is not sur- 
prising then, that the people should turn hopefully to it 
once more in their present difficulties. 



THE SPIRIT OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. 

From an Address to the Shawnee County Republican 
Cluh, March, 1916. 

To us in this critical time of stress and doubt the great 
cheering fact is the strong rising tide of Republicanism 
that has set in all over the country. When the nation needs 



352 SPIRIT OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY 

sturdy Americanism in its government, the Republican 
party always seems to get the job. At such times mere 
part}^ differences within the ranks are forgotten in the 
party's response to the nation's call. As a party, in times 
of crises, the Republican party has always chosen to hang 
together. It may be as one of the signers of the Declaration 
of Independence put it on a memorable occasion, that we 
choose to hang together for the reason that if we don't we 
are likely to hang separately. But I prefer to put the rea- 
son on much higher ground than any mere self-interest. 
Unlike our Democratic brethren we choose, as Republicans, 
some otlier time than a time of national anxiety and unrest 
for our political post-mortems and hair-pulling matches. 
In time of need it is and always has been the characteristic 
of sturdy Republican citizenship to line up shoulder to 
shoulder and go forward together with one common pur- 
pose for the common good. I know no more admirable trait 
of Republicans as party men than this. It is country first, 
political differences hist. In moments of trial, in time of 
trouble, of doubt, or of national perplexity, Republicanism 
always becomes a strongly united, effective force. It never 
crumbles, disintegrates nor weakens under strain. And 
just now we are seeing a. strong rebirth of this fine national 
spirit within the party and every man of us who loves his 
country feels like uttering a fervent Amen. 

In Kansas I think we have come early to feel tliat it is 
not only a downright national need but a patriotic duty 
for us to come together. The desire among all Republicans 
in every part of the state is to avoid or ignore every cause 
of friction which does not require an actual sacrifice of 
principle. There is everywhere a feeling of harmony and 
of confidence, a belief that the party is called by the coun- 
try's need speedily to resume the reins of government. The 
feeling is general and compelling that if the party gives 
the country renewed assurance that it is fully worthy of 
that confidence and that it fully estimates the need at this 
time of the most level-headed leadership, by selecting for 



GOOD LEADERS ARE NEEDED 353 

its candidate for President its highest, sanest type of leader, 
that the country will turn with joy and relief to forward- 
looking Republicanism, as a homesick child to its mother, 
and that a soberer, calmer judgment will take the place of 
the uneasiness, the semi-hysteria and the indecision which 
has come to characterize the state of the country under the 
AVilson administration. 

The first great, important, strategical step will be the 
selection of a leader that every element of the party can 
unite in supporting with enthusiasm and respect. To this 
end every Republican must yield as wtII as demand the 
fullest freedom of choice. He must get rid of the feeling, 
if he has it, that only the particular man he may have in 
view will do for the party's national standard bearer. At 
the same time if the party cannot unite whole-heartedly 
and enthusiastically, without misgivings, on the man finally 
chosen, it will, I fear, prove to the nation a lack of patriot- 
ism in not responding loyally and spontaneously to the 
country's need, and that we know is foreign to the finest 
traditions of the party. We may well remember with pride 
that the Republican party never j^et has given the nation 
an unworthy or an unsuccessful President. We know, too, 
it is equally true to say that we never have known it to 
lack for strong, well-seasoned, finely grained Presidential 
timber — the straight and clean kind. 

We want particularly at this time a man thoroly 
representative of our finest, strongest, staunchest, most 
progressive and most sterling Americanism. A man who 
will move, powerfully and effectively and work unerringly 
for American progress at home, who will command and 
restore respect for America abroad, who will not brook a 
deliberate affront to the nation predicated on the belief 
that he will not act, who will not, on the other hand, go to 
war except as a last resort. Such a man — I believe most 
of us think in Kansas — is Charles E. Hughes. 

In Judge Hughes we should have a man of poise, capable 
of directing and enlisting the best elements of both wings 



354 SPIRIT OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY 

of the party in the noble work of reconstruction, of putting 
America and American principles firmly on the high plane 
they should occupy, a man capable of steering this country 
thru the difficulties and perils of readjustment certain 
to follow after the Great War. He would guide us safely 
and surely between the traditional radicalism and the coun- 
ter-balancing conservatism of the party. In his policy he 
would be neither too impulsive nor too slow. His record is 
without spot and no one stands higher in the confidence of 
the people of all parties from one end of the land to the 
other. The country has turned to him spontaneously. If 
the country calls him in its hour of need, calls him unmis- 
takably and emphatically, I think his deep convictions of 
public duty will prompt him to respond. 

For the rest, my friends, I think a new and greater day 
of Republican opportunity is, at hand for the greatest na- 
tion and the greatest party in the world. Let us get to- 
gether as patriots and as brothers ; as Kansans and as citi- 
zens of the greatest and the noblest and the most richly en- 
dowed republic of all time. 



REPUBLICANISM AND WHAT IT STANDS FOR 

From a Speech at the Kansas City Republican Cluh Ban- 
quet, Muehlehach Hotel, November 8, 1917. 

The Re])u])liean governor of the Republican state of Iowa 
and the Republican governor of the Republican state of 
Kansas — I say Republican Kansas, despite the little fling 
the old girl took a year ago, when she wandered off on elec- 
tion day and failed to find her way home, landing just as 
far from the sheltering fold at nightfall as was your own 
state of Missouri — these two Republican governors have 
come here to the border land of Democracy, upon your 
most gracious invitation, to confer with vou to the end that 



POLICY OF TRUE AMERICANISM 355 

we may all renew the faith and get fresh inspiration for 
the work that is before us. 

I am most happy to come, because I realize that it is 
easily possible for us to become so engrossed with the big 
job this nation has upon its hands — a task that calls for 
every ounce of energy and every heartbeat of devotion we 
have — that we overlook and forget some of the other duties 
of good citizenship. It is well to be reminded of them. 

The winning of the war is, of course, the thought that 
is supreme in the mind of every man here tonight. We 
are going to win, but what the victory shall mean to us 
and to the world; how far a policy of true Americanism 
shall prevail in the peace and in the adjustment and settle- 
ment of the tliousand problems that will follow— these are 
questions which cannot be left for chance to decide. We 
must prepare to meet them and prepare now. They will 
call for the wisest statesmanship that this country can pro- 
duce ; a vision, a grasp, an understanding that comes only 
with a soundness in fundamentals. We who are here 
tonight believe that this statesmanship, this vision, this 
understanding, is most likely to be found among the men 
who adhere to the principles we group under the name 
Republicanism. We believe this because we believe in the 
inherent soundness of the principles of Republicanism as 
contrasted with the principles of Democracy. 

The time is happily gone when any one political party 
can lay claim to all the patriotism, or all the honesty or all 
the ability in the country. We gain ' nothing by blind 
prejudice. But ours is a system of government by political 
parties. Our whole machinery of government calls for the 
existence of parties. It is only by joining together in a 
partisan organization that citizens of the same political 
faith — men and women who believe in the same funda- 
mental principles — can make their faith effective. 

And, do not allow the careless thinker to persuade you 
that there is no vital difference between the two dominant 
parties in this country. Don't let anyone say to you that 



356 WHAT REPUBLICANISM MEANS 

government is altogether a question of men. There is a 
fundamental difference between the Republican and the 
Democratic parties. 

I am a Republican because I believe with my whole soul 
in the basic principles for which the Republican party- 
stands. I believe in these principles because my personal 
observation in the present generation and the history of 
past generations have taught me that those principles work ! 
They have been tried and were not found wanting. I am 
a Republican not simply because some other man was a 
Republican last year, and -another is a Republican this 
year, but because the Republican party more than any 
other is animated by the American spirit and always has 
upheld our national self-respect at home and abroad. It 
has done this not by threats, nor bluster, but in the fair, 
firm, kindly and dignified way characteristic of America's 
true attitude toward the world, and in accord with our 
belief in the brotherhood of man. 

I am a Republican because I believe in nationalism rather 
than sectionalism; because I believe in the protection of 
American labor and American industry; because I think 
more of the United States than of all the rest of the world 
combined ; because I believe in forward-looking, construc- 
tive policies as opposed to the drifting policy of opportuni- 
ties; because I believe in all the ideals for which the Re- 
publican party strives. 

We arc told by. our Democratic friends at Washington 
who have been playing politics with all the skill they can 
command, that this is no time for partisanship — that we 
must get l)ehind the President and extol to the skies every 
move lie and his satellites make. 

Well, the Republican party, both in Congress and in the 
nation at large, has shown that it needs no such admonition. 
To our everlasting credit, be it said, we have not been 
partisan. Never before in the history of the nation has a 
party in the minority shown such willingness to lay aside 
all differences and to unite with the opposition — or at least 



THE MEN WHO WERE LOYAL 357 

such part of the opposition as had any definite notion of 
what was to be done in meeting a great national crisis. As 
a matter of fact President Wilson, like an illustrious prede- 
cessor, had a party on his hands that true to its history, 
was unorganized and unmanageable. With all his canni- 
ness and determination, with all the patronage distributed 
where it was expected to do the greatest good, the President 
and his program made little headway until the Republicans 
in Congress came to his rescue. My recollection is that even 
the two Democratic Senators from your own rock-ribbed 
old state of Missouri, didn't exactly trail along with their 
distinguished leader. At least not all the time. Practically 
every important measure that the President pushed thru 
a disorganized, chaotic Congress, was passed only by the aid 
of patriotic Republicans who would not sit idly by and see 
the head of the nation embarrassed and hampered in a time 
of national danger. With few exceptions— leaving the fiery 
volcano of Wisconsin and a few others out of the count — 
the bitterest critics of President Wilson since the war began 
have been Democrats, not Republicans. We cannot be ac- 
cused of unfairness or unfriendliness. We have stood be- 
hind him ; we have stood by him ; we have stood for him — 
and that, gentlemen, is as much as you can expect from 
human nature. 

But, my friends, our patriotism ; our loyalty to our coun- 
try ; our desire to serve first of all the- big, broad issue ; our 
care to avoid narrow partisanship, need not and must not 
lead us into a sickly sentimentality. I don 't believe I could 
be very much of a citizen if I didn't have at least a few 
pretty clearly defined ideas on government and govern- 
mental policies — ideas which are basic and fundamental. 
And I couldn't be very much of a man if I didn't stand 
up for those ideas thru thick and thin. The indifferent 
citizen, the man who doesn't care, the fellow who says, "0, 
what 's the use ? " is more dangerous to the state than is the 
positive, open foe of good government. So, the party — the 
political organization in which men who adhere to the same 



358 WHAT REPUBLICANISM MEANS 

general ideas of public policy, may get together and work 
together — becomes a necessity. We get nowhere with it. 
And the more earnest a man is in his political convictions, 
the greater his faith in the fundamentals to which he holds, 
the more likely he is to have a high regard for the party 
of his choice; the more likely is his fealty to his party to 
take on the aspect of intense partisanship. 

And I want to tell you why I am a Republican. I am 
now and I have always been a party man — ^not because I 
have ever placed party above patriotism, not because I have 
ever exalted faction above country or conscience — but be- 
cause I know that men who think alike about the great 
fundamental things which concern the happiness and well- 
being of the people can never carry into effect the prin- 
ciples in which they believe without getting together and 
working together — without a clearly defined organization, 
and that organization naturally takes the shape and form 
of a political party. 

I am a party man because under our form of govern- 
ment the political party is the only effective means by 
which the people can make themselves felt in the govern- 
ment, and I am a Republican party man because I believe 
in my deepest heart that it is by means of and thru the Re- 
publican party that the great problems of popular govern- 
ment — the new problems that a world war has thrust upon 
us, can be the most surely, the most sanely, and the most 
justly solved. 

I am a Republican because I believe that the Republican 
party — conceived in Righteousness — born of a holy purpose 
— baptized in blood and nurtured by the high ideals of 
Justice, Fraternity, Equality — is destined by Almighty 
God to solve and solve riglilly the problems of the Amer- 
ican people — so that this nation shall have again, in the 
words of the immortal Lincoln, "a new birth of freedom 
and that government of the people, by the people, for the 
people shall not perish from the earth." 

I say that I believe the Republican party will solve these 



A PARTY WITH A RECORD 359 

problems, because I believe it to be the most progressive, 
the most intelligent, the most beneficent political organiza- 
tion ever known in this or any other country ; because it is 
a party not ashamed of its past ; because it has enriched 
our history with a long list of imperishable names that will 
be an inspiration and an example for generations to come; 
because it insists that every legal voter shall have a right 
to cast one free, unintimidated ballot and to have that ballot 
honestly counted ; because it is "not afraid to champion the 
cause of the weak, the poor, the humblest citizen ; because 
it stands for justice, free popular government, individual 
liberty, and a fair chance in the battle of life for all people ; 
because it stands for a square deal as between man and 
man and has the courage to attack unjust combinations of 
selfish interests and to assail vice however strongly en- 
trenched it may be. 

We are, to be sure, first of all Americans; but we are 
also Republicans and we are Republicans because we hon- 
estly and sincerely believe that the Republican party rep- 
resents and embodies in itself the highest type of 'Amer- 
icanism. When the life of the nation is at stake, we have 
worked loyally and heartily with the Democratic adminis- 
tration and shall continue to do so — but only because the 
Democrats happened to be on the job when hell broke loose 
and there hasn't been time since to make a change. We 
have not lost nor given up one of the smallest tenets of our 
faith. Our Republicanism is as strong, as virile and as 
attractive as it ever was — indeed, stronger than ever, be- 
cause nothing in the world is so sure to strengthen the 
Republican party as a good dose of Democracy. 

A farmer friend of mine out in Kansas frequently says : 
''I never bawl out the hired man when the hay is cut and 
a storm's brewing. But I take care to have a reckoning 
when pay-day comes. ' ' The Republican party and the peo- 
ple of the nation are acting exactly on that principle. They 
are sajnng little now — and wisgly so — but they are keeping 
their eyes open and their brains working. They are meet- 



360 WHAT REPUBLICANISM MEANS 

iiig the situation as it is and are making the best of it, but 
they are also keeping up a lot of thinking, and like my 
Kansas friend, they'll take good care to have a reckoning 
when pay-day comes. They will not be fooled for one 
moment by political propaganda skillfully slipped into so- 
called patriotic appeals emanating from partisan sources. 
Tliey are not blind to the favoritism and partisanship dis- 
played in so marked a degree in appointments. They are 
not . unheedf ul of reckless waste and extravagance; and 
they will demand an accounting of the stewardship. It is 
unfortunate for the Democratic party, I think, that the 
administration succeeded over Republican protests in as- 
suming-the responsibility for the expenditure without audit 
or accounting of such enormous sums of money as the war 
has made necessary. The fact that haste is imperative 
would suggest the greater need of every possible safeguard 
against — well, let us say against "errors" and "mistakes" 
and ' ' poor judgment. ' ' The American people are not going 
to begrudge any of the billions spent in behalf of the right- 
eous cause we espouse ; nothing costs too much if it increases 
the efficiency of our arms, or adds to the safety and com- 
fort of our boys ; no price is too high to pay for quick 
action. We are waging our fight in no niggardly spirit; 
but to paraphrase a historic utterance, the nation will say 
on reckoning day : ' ' Billions for defense and more billions 
if needed, but not one cent for waste or graft or incom- 
petency. ' ' 

And incompetency is the first name of the Democratic 
party. 

The winning of the war is a task for a united people. 
There is no room for argument when it comes to smashing 
the Hun. But in the economic, the political, the social 
questions which will crowd upon us when the war is done, 
there will be all the diversity of opinion, the conflict of 
interest, the clash of ideals that has ever marked political 
and economic struggles. It js trite to say "The world never 
will be the same again." We all recognize that. We all 



REAL MISSION OF REPUBLICANS 361 

know that this nation will not go back to many of the old 
ways. How far will we go in the other direction? How 
fully shall we respond to new demands and adopt new 
methods? How much of pure socialism shall we retain in 
our political system, after the occasion which called it into 
use, has passed? These are questions which the party and 
the nation must face. They will call for courage and gen- 
uine conviction ; they will call for statecraft and devotion 
to principle. And men, I believe when the American people 
are brought face to face with these problems they will want 
to run no risk in their solution. If the Republican party 
is true to its traditions there can be no doubt of the result. 
The people will turn to us as to a haven in a time of storm. 

Standing square-toed and upright upon the great funda- 
mental principles of the Republican party, we never have 
been defeated. The party has been overthrown only when 
it has courted the disasters which overtook it — only when 
we have deserted the ways of the fathers and have gone off 
after strange gods, or when we have allowed selfishness and 
greed to dominate the party machinery, to engender fac- 
tional strife, to blind our eyes to the real mission of our 
party. We must not forget that parties are but the agencies 
to promote the interests of the peoples; this is especially 
true of the Republican party, and so long as it patriotically 
and loyally serves well the people, it will receive their sanc- 
tion and support. The Republican party is today the same 
strong, straightforward, aggressive organization that it has 
ever been, and if it were not that kind of an organization 
it could not for one moment have my support. I have the 
utmost faith that it will be the party always prepared to 
meet the greatest emergency, ahvays master of every occa- 
sion, always ready to battle for the rights of the people. 

I rejoice in the fact that the Republican party is not a 
one man party. I rejoice in the fact that it is big enough 
and broad enough and great enough to embrace many men 
of many minds. I rejoice in the fact that there is no place 
in the policies of the Republican party for the lash or yoke 



362 WHAT REPUBLICANISM MEANS 

— that every member of the party has a right to his indi- 
vidual opinion and the right to express that opinion, but, 
I -also rejoice that as Republicans our faith in the funda- 
mental principles and in the honesty of purpose of our 
party, is so great that when the nation is assailed by an 
enemy and our very liberties are threatened, we will forget 
our personal differences, forget questions of minor impor- 
tance, lay aside our personal ambitions and work together 
for the common good — for the maintenance of those policies 
of government which bring the greatest good to the great- 
est number. 

What of the future? I have no fear for the future of 
America. We have had a revival of patriotism that was 
sorely needed; its effects will be lasting. The wave may 
recede, our fervor may somewhat abate, but not before a 
permanent impress is made upon our people and our insti- 
tutions. However much we may deplore the horrors of 
war, we know that real men emerge from it. Our Civil War 
and our little brush with Spain, gave us heroic figures who 
came out of the war to take up the reins of government. 
History will repeat itself. The men who are defending the 
liberties of the world today will rule the world tomorrow. 
And if we can trust these men to fight for us, we may safely 
entrust to them our destinies in time of peace. The nation 
will be safe in their hands. 

As to the future of the Republican party, I answer with 
all confidence that it is yet at the threshold, yet in the 
dawn of its development; the light of the morning is still 
shining upon this superb organization; under its patriotic 
progressive policies the nation will go onward and upward 
to heights not yet won; I have faith that it will continue 
to deserve and retain the confidence of the voters, command 
their devotion and wisely direct the struggle for justice and 
popular democratic government. 

There is much work for the Republican party to do in 
the immediate future, but I say to you I do not for one 
moment doubt that it will go forward with high resolution, 



THE SPIRIT OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 363 

fearlessly facing the new problems which confront our peo- 
ple, meeting well the new duties which will come to us, and 
conducting the affairs of this country in the spirit of high- 
minded patriotism. 

I hope and believe, my friends, that this inspiring polit- 
ical love-feast is an influence that shall give courage and 
strength to every loyal Republican in Missouri; that it is 
the beginning of a new revival of Republican sentiment 
that shall fill the state from one end to the other, and from 
this hour there will go forth new glory, new hope, new 
inspiration. 

Let it be known that we come here in the spirit of the 
founders of our party, in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, 
cherishing that broader optimism which should be ours as 
American citizens, to join hands and hearts that we may 
continue to strengthen, uplift and upbuild the great Re- 
publican cause and perpetuate its patriotic principles in 
the state and in the nation. Inspired with renewed ardor 
for our party, with larger, broader, more exalted views of 
its great responsibilities, taking new heart and new cour- 
age, let us here and now pledge ourselves as patriotic Amer- 
icans, as loyal, progressive, stalwart Republicans, to set 
the standard of Republicanism higher and higher, moving 
steadfastly onward and upward in the accomjjlishment of 
still greater victories and in the winning of new glories for 
our country and our people. 



PROHIBITION ADDRESSES 

Thruout his career as a publisher and a public official 
Arthur Capper has been au ardent supporter of prohibition. 
He has upheld and defended this generation-old Kansas 
policy at home and abroad and is recognized the nation over 
as a champion of national prohibition. His addresses on 
this subject have been a great help to the prohibition cause. 
Extracts from them may be found in the following pages. 



COMPARING A DRY STATE AND A WET STATE. 

An Address Delivered Before the National Prohihition Con- 
vention at Topeka, Kan., December 30, 1914. 

It was peculiarly fitting that this convention of prohibi- 
tionists should come to Kansas. No more appropriate state 
could have been chosen. This is true not only because of 
the pleasure we have in welcoming you to our capital, but 
also because of the pleasure we hope you may have during 
your visit. Kansas is so genuinely a prohibition state that 
its people believe it should be headquarters for the move- 
ment which I am confident will, much sooner than many 
of us believe, bring about nation-wide abolishment of the 
liquor traffic. 

Kansas pleads guilty to intemperance in only one form: 
its determination to be an absolutely clean state, a safe 
state in which to rear children, to build happy homes, to 
encourage the highest standards of morality, and to make 
those standards possible by enforcing the statutes wisely 

365 



366 RECORD OF WETS AND DRYS 

enacted to that eud. In such laudable ambitions Kansas 
does not believe it possible to be too Enthusiastic. By trying 
zealously and consistently to maintain such a plane of 
living, Kansas has reduced its per capita consumption of 
liquor to $1.25, compared with $21, the per capita consump- 
tion of the average state having saloons. Kansas has 1% 
million j)opulation, with more children enrolled in its 
schools and higher institutions of learning than any other 
state in the Union, having approximately the same number 
of children. It has as many students in its State Univer- 
sity at Lawrence and its great agricultural college at Man- 
hattan as are entered in similar institutions in Illinois with 
its 6 million population. 

It is inevitable that such reflections should lead to the 
recital of other facts certain to convince and encourage the 
states now striving to emulate the example of Kansas. 
What other state, let me ask you, has forty-eight counties 
that did not send one criminal to the penitentiary last year, 
or eighty-seven counties that did not send a patient to the 
asylums for the insane, or fifty-three counties without a 
prisoner in their jails, or eighty-three counties without a 
pauper ? 

Kansas has the lowest death rate in the world, nearly 
300 per cent lower than Missouri or any other saloon state. 
Kansas has the lowest percentage of illiteracy in the United 
States, largely as the result of its thirty-two years of pro- 
hil)itirtn ; and Kansas has comforts and conveniences im- 
possible in states where saloons exist. 

Comparisons are not always polite, but sometimes they 
are inestimably valuable and important. If I choose to 
refer to our sister state on the east — Missouri — I do it be- 
cause it is the nearest one having saloons and all the eco- 
nomic waste which saloons entail. In Missouri, then, one 
farmer in a hundred has an automobile. In Kansas one 
farmer in five owns a car. Kansas has crowded colleges 
and schools that cost the people about 3V2 million dollars 
a year. Missouri has 4,000 saloons into which its 



HOW KANSAS INVESTS ITS WEALTH 367 

people pay 80 million dollars a year. Missouri has about 
$20 per capita in the savings banks. Kansas, with 21/4 ^^- 
lion less population, has more than a hundred dollars per 
capita in the savings banks, and about $600 to every family 
within its borders. In Missouri, last year, the assessed 
valuation was $1,650,000,000 while in Kansas it was $2,810,- 
000,000. In Missouri the assessed valuation is $300 per 
capita. In Kansas it is $1,750. In Kansas the increase in 
wealth during the last ten years has been at the rate of 120 
million dollars a year ! Missouri has more natural advan- 
tages than Kansas, such as mineral deposits, forests, richer 
soil, more rainfall, and nearer and larger markets. Mis- 
souri also has millions invested in breweries and its 4,000 
saloons, but Kansas lent 50 million dollars to New York 
in the panic of 1907, while Missouri declined to send 
a penny. Missouri 's wealth has been going into saloons and 
breweries to an alarming extent. Kansas' wealth has been 
going into silos and banks, into safe homes, into educational 
institutions, into town improvements. Scarcely a town in 
the state, of 1,500 population, is without electric lights, 
sewers, water-works and paving. 

I need not prolong the comparisons. These results, these 
conditions, and Kansas' success with the enforcement of 
the prohibitory laws, make it the duty of Kansas people 
to take the lead in an active propaganda for making this 
a saloonless nation. To this extent, as a state among states, 
we are emphatically "our brother's keeper." 

It is not difficult in studying Missouri and Kansas to 
conclude precisely what may be expected in a common- 
wealth having saloons. Such facts and figures drive home 
a lesson which every American municipality should put 
into large type and post where every man, woman and 
child might see it every day in the year. Such facts and 
figures af)pall the thinking man, but others more startling 
may be found in several saloon states. Mr. Collard, a for- 
mer saloon keeper in Chicago, has given figures showing 
that the income necessary to provide for the licenses, rent, 



368 RECORD OF WETS AND DRYS 

help, liquors and profits for Chicago's 7,200 saloons was 
not less than 140 million dollars in 1913. Put into legiti- 
mate channels this money Avould duplicate the present small 
park system of that city and pay for its up-keep ; it would 
pay for the police department, the fire department, the 
health department, and duplicate each of them, and then 
leave about 70 million dollars for family clothing and food, 
with still enough to build a row 40 miles long of $10,000 
homes each on a 50-foot lot, 96 to the mile. Think what 
it might do for the starving millions of Belgium and 
Mexico and other war-stricken countries. In return for this 
enormous waste, which some unconscious humorist has re- 
ferred to as "staggering," the city of Chicago receives 7 
million dollars a year — not enough to pay for its hospitals, 
jails, penitentiary, criminal courts, and the graft which 
liquor ahvays engenders. How can any state, inhabited by 
intelligent, thinking voters, permit such conditions to con- 
tinue ? 

Since Kansas became a prohibition state this nation has 
recorded a remarkable change in public opinion with re- 
gard to liquor and its drinking. Not so very many years 
ago the temperance lecturer was regarded by many really 
respectable persons as a nuisance against which the ordi- 
nances of towns and cities unhappily provided no protec- 
tion. Not very many business men cared to have their 
names identified witli a propaganda which threatened what 
some queer mentalities believed to be the "rights of prop- 
erty and human freedom and personal privilege." Men 
who would not steal a penny or do another a conscious 
wrong held aloof from the temperance or prohibition agita- 
tion precisely as some otherwise normal persons would not, 
today, care to be seen carrying a Bible through the streets. 
Men pointed to Germany where, they declared, generation 
after generation were reared with beer or wine at every 
meal, or to Russia where vodka was a common drink, manu- 
factured by the government itself. They paraded every- 
where the specter of municipalities bankrupted through 



AMERICANS THINK FOR THEMSELVES 369 

the abolishing of saloons and the license tax such business 
provided. No other one reform in American life ever had 
arrayed against it the men and the millions that were ar- 
rayed and are still arrayed against prohibition. 

But the Americah people have been reading and observ- 
ing and thinking — thinking for themselves. The millions 
of the brewers and the distilleries corrupted legislatures 
and councils. They sent across this land in every direc- 
tion the most insidious falsehoods ever conceived to blind 
the people. But the temperance lecturers of years ago, 
tireless and loyal thru every kind of disheartenment 
and persecution, had done their work thoroly as they 
passed along. The people of this nation were alive, at last, 
to the truth. 

Presently there came a day when the great railroads, 
the leading industries of every kind in which capital was 
largely invested, the newspapers, the magazines, the men 
everywhere sincerely concerned for the safety of their in- 
vestments and for the country's welfare, turned their backs 
upon liquor and its damning blight. And we began to 
hope for national prohibition. It took, even then, a sturdy 
character to stand sponsor for the act in Congress. It took 
a man brave enough to c\rive his craft, for his country's 
sake, straight into the face of the enemy's fortifications, 
to capture a hostile fleet. It took the right sort of courage 
to do both these things; and the latest achievement, like 
the first, will result in a victory for America. The nation, 
I know and you know, will never forget this modern Hob- 
son's Choice. 

Not alone in America have wise men frowned upon 
drink. The nations long held up as examples of industrial 
progress in the presence of whisky and beer and wine, have 
turned against such traffic. It takes a great crisis, some- 
times, to achieve great deeds. It took the world's mightiest 
tragedy, its most awful war, to wipe out the curse of strong 



370 RECORD OF WETS AND DRYS 

drink in Russia. It took the blare of trumpets and the call 
to arms to put Germany against it. 

And fearful as this war has been — and is — its million 
dead compares but weakly against the millions dead or 
ruined by liquor. Broken homes, broken hearts, broken 
hopes, property loss, social disintegration, political corrup- 
tion — was it any wonder that Kansas people declared these 
things must not be ? Who shall say that any Kansas idiosyn- 
cracy, any Kansas peculiarity of temperament, any char- 
acteristic Kansas ebullition, religious, political, literary or 
social, was not more than paid for, thirty-two years ago, 
when Kansas drove out forever, this hateful traffic and 
all it entails? No one item in all the fifty years' history 
of this state will endure so long in men's minds, or do so 
much to keep men's minds straight. 

Kansas is a state of homes into which the Saturday night 
pay envelope is taken regularly. Therefore Kansas is 
prosperous and, even without its three chief crops, worth 
nearly 275 million dollars this year, its savings banks tell 
the tale of temperance and the thrift that temperance be- 
gets. On the west, its sister state — Colorado, has joined 
the elect, so that the boundary line is no longer a menace 
to sobriety. On the south is Oklahoma, dry from its birth. 
On the north Nebraska is striving for the light, and on 
the east Missouri is trying to be free. 

We all know now that prohibition is not an easy condi- 
tion to achieve or to maintain. It takes constant vigilance 
and ceaseless enforcement of law. In the great cities it 
will be even more difficult until the manufacturing of 
whisky and every other intoxicating liquor is forbidden by 
federal statutes. Already it has been made plain in Kansas 
that no man can gain office on what we have known as a 
"wide open" platform. You may depend upon the women 
even if all the men should fail. But the men will not fail. 
Men know now that the good they do lives after them. 
Men, I like to believe, are concerning themselves with bet- 



WHY KANSAS IS PROSPEROUS 371 

ter things than in any other age, determined to take their 
part in the highest and best of human endeavor. 

Kansas is trying to point the way along a clean and well 
kept highway. Why sliould not Kansas be chosen as the 
meeting place for such a gathering as this? Why should 
not Kansas be looked to as proof that towns can prosper 
without revenue paid for in human lives and women's 
happiness? Why should not Kansas do a mighty part in 
the struggle to clean the nation itself? 

Kansas, my friends, is proof that prohibition actually 
does prohibit, after every allowance is made for the frail- 
ties of men. And Kansas is prosperous and at peace with 
itself in the consciousness that it has set a high mark and 
tried to live up to it. 



PROHIBITION LAAV RIGIDLY ENFORCED IN 

KANSAS 

From an Address to the Kansas State Temperance Union, 
December 14, 1915. 

This world has been fighting for thousands of years 
against the Devil as represented in vice of every kind, and 
I suspect it will have to continue the battle to the end of 
time. I believe, sincerely, that in Kansas we are socially 
cleaner and that the prohibition law is more generally 
observed than at any other time. I make no intentional 
reflection on any other administration in saying this. I 
mean that- in every possible way, so far as this administra- 
tion is concerned, the law is being enforced. I believe that 
with few exceptions the county officers in every part of 
this state are eager to do their duty. I believe that with 
the assistance of the attorney general, S. M. Brewster, and 
his efficient aides, these county officers will see to it that 
the state's name is not tarnished. It gives me a good deal 
of pleasure, in this connection, to commend the attorney 



372 PROHIBITION LAWS IN KANSAS 

general for his excellent services in enforcing the liquor 
laws. No governor ever had more hearty co-operation than 
I have had from Mr. Brewster's office. He realizes, as I 
do, and as you and every other careful thinker must real- 
ize, that thruout Kansas and especially in the border 
counties of this state we must expect to encounter viola- 
tions of the prohibitory law. This is inevitable. Consider 
Atchison and Leavenworth and Kansas City, on the edge 
of the law 's control. One no sooner crosses the line outside 
of Atchison than one is confronted with the saloon menace, 
flaunting its brazen head in the face of decency with signs 
painted large enough to be read a mile away — the whisky 
dealer's defiance — his last, let us hope — to society's re- 
straint. We must expect to have trouble in such quarters, 
and we must be prepared for it. Indeed, it is not too much 
to say that we shall have this kind of opposition until the 
last state has gone dry and the entire nation has voted its 
determination to close the last saloon on the North Amer- 
ican continent. 

Prohibition is not merely a matter of enactment. It 
takes more than a legislature to give a state decency. It 
takes the great, sincere and sober-minded determination of 
the public, of what we call society itself, to make a state 
clean. We do not stop whisky drinking or bootlegging by 
making it illegal to do those things. We must make that 
man an outcast who persistently and intentionally violates 
the law and defies the wishes of the people. We must 
make every man know that he offends not only the law but 
the entire public when he violates this law, precisely as 
we treat a man who commits any other felony. He can 
have no more consideration than he has shown for others. 
He will fight desperately, with falsehood for his chief 
weapon, but the forces of righteousness need only to en- 
force the law, to support and uphold the officers who rep- 
resent the public, to stand back of every man who is doing 
his duty for the state, and above all to tell the truth. The 
truth, told every day, will down the liquor evil in this 



PROBLEM OF LAW ENFORCEMENT 373 

country. We need resort to no subterfuges. We need 
twist no figures. We need only the facts about Kansas to 
convince any intelligent person that prohibition not only 
does prohibit, but that in addition it builds up a fine, 
stalwart social body of energetic, ambitious and patriotic 
men and women. 

It is not my purpose to spend the time allotted to me 
on this program in telling of the benefits of prohibition to 
Kansas and its blessings to her people. All of you know 
that as well as I do. Many of you have been actively in- 
terested in prohibition for a generation and it is needless 
to speak to you of its beneficent influence on the citizen, 
the home and the state. I shall devote my remarks to a 
presentation of the problem of law enforcement. That is 
what the governor of Kansas is now interested in, perhaps 
more than any other one question. A law uninforced or 
unobserved is worse than no law at all. It is the putting 
of life into a law that makes it effective, just the same as 
putting life into anything else gives it strength and power. 
And I am doing all in my power to instill more life into 
the prohibitory law than it has ever had in it before. That 
prohibition is more effective today than any previous time 
in the history of the state is attested not only by observa- 
tions of public officers and prominent citizens generally, 
but also by public records as well. 

You know, of course, that ever since this state closed 
its doors to the liquor business, a never-ending campaign 
of falsehood has been conducted. You know that, with 
scarcely an exception, not one truthful assertion has been 
published by the liquor interests about Kansas. You know 
these things, and I mention them now only because it is 
necessary, after thirty years of denials, t« continue our 
watchfulness, to remain always on guard against the sin- 
ister operations of this powerful enemy. 

You know most of the falsehoods told about Kansas in 
the past. The wonder in my mind has always been over 
the strange sort of mentality responsible for this particular 



374 PROHIBITION LAWS IN KANSAS 

kind of mendacity. I have marveled at the queer assur- 
ance which has led the liquor interests to suppose that their 
vicious misrepresentations would not be discovered untrue. 
In every possible way these forces have injured their own 
chances — if they ever had any — by wilfully and malevo- 
lently doing the wrong thing. Some of you will remember 
how true this has proved with respect to all the alleged 
statistics about this state. So palpably false have all their 
charges been that in quarters even superficially informed, 
the liquor interests' publicity has proved a boomerang. 

There comes to mind at this instant the whisky dealers' 
argument to the effect that the savings banks' deposits in 
Kansas are so very much less than in license states. At 
first blush this kind of report may influence some men. 
But what I cannot understand is the peculiar implication, 
inevitably and certainly intended to be conveyed, that men 
in license states are, by reason of the saloons and other 
unrestricted liberties, encouraged to lay away more money 
than are the working men of Kansas. Of course the asser- 
tion is absurd, as are all the foolish reports emanating from 
the whisky ring. Purposely they neglected to show that 
Kansas has only five savings banks within its borders. The 
state's enormous reserve of money is in another form of 
bank, not called a savings bank. So the story falls flat, as 
do all the stories sent out by the agency that creates it. 

We have adhered to our ideals for thirty years. When 
we began the crusade against liquor, a "temperance re- 
former," as he Avas called, was a strange sort of human 
being. Men of intellect tolerated him — or her — and some- 
times went to hear the lecture and see the "examples" 
which once were a part of every' such evening. What a 
change we have seen in public opinion since those days — ■ 
thirty years ago ! So generally are all our present day 
ideas accepted among business and professional men that 
the opponent to such ideas is in the position in which the 
"temperance reformer" once found himself. Railroads no 
longer employ drinkers. No form of business, not even 



A DRY STATE AND A WET STATE 375 

the saloons, will give work to a man who drinks ! So com- 
mon-place are the standards we seek now that to enumerate 
them seems trite. So widely acknowledged are all the 
pathological facts, once doubted or denied, that we scarcely 
refer to them any more. From trying to convert a skep- 
tical public we have come to the job of policing border 
lines to keep out the undesirables, to exclude the occasional 
shipment of contraband goods, to detect those who would 
break the state's blockade. 

Prohibition is accepted the country over wherever there 
is a gathering of business or professional men. No man 
who travels outside his own township or state doubts this. 
The nation is going straight on to decency. 

National prohibition is certain to win. Its complete vic- 
tory may not come so early as many of us are hoping it 
will come. But no matter about that. We shall keep on 
fighting just the same. The enemy is strong and resource- 
ful. In a meeting of the National Anti-Saloon League 
two years ago $30,000, seemingly a generous sum, was 
raised in thirty minutes to fight the liquor power. But 
the liquor power raised 4 million dollars with which tc 
fight prohibition. That does not discourage us. It only 
nerves us to fight tlie harder. Neither 4 million dollars 
nor 400 million dollars can stop the onward march of pro- 
hibition in this country. There is no complete and final 
solution of all social, moral and industrial problems, but 
national prohibition is the next great step to be taken in 
this country and I rejoice that Kansas is regarded all over 
the country as the leader of that movement. 



A TOAST. 



From an Address at Scottish Rite Banquet, April 8, 1915. 

I ask you to drink with me a toast to this delicious and 
popular Kansas beverage — the only drink that Kansas 



376 A SCOTTISH RITE BANQUET TOAST 

knows on occasions such as this; the drink that Father 
Adam quaffed in the Garden of Eden before the serpent 
entered; the drink that Mother Eve lifted in her pink 
palms and let trickle between the lips of the first born of 
the human race ; the drink of the mighty emperor, the gay- 
courtier, the humble peasant and the abject slave ; the 
drink that sustains the stalwart laborer, the lusty athlete 
and the fever-tossed invalid ; the drink of the man of 
sobriety and the life-saver of the man of booze on the 
morning after. 

Here, then, is to Water, God's most beneficent gift to 
man — the favorite Kansas beverage. Whether it dances 
and sparkles in a tiny rill or lies deep and mysterious in 
a mighty lake, whether we draw it from deep crevices of 
the earth or imprison it behind huge embankments, it is 
for man and beast, for flock and herd, for field and forest, 
for flower and birds, the magical elixir of life — the vital 
fluid of all living things. It is a gift of God which we can 
see fall from His heaven. Let us take it, then, as His gift 
and pledge ourselves to keep it free from all contaminating 
poisons. 

Here's to AVater — the symbol of purity. Let us drink 
it freely, reverently and joyously, and may it soon become 
our national drink. 



WHAT PROHIBITION HAS DONE FOR KANSAS. 

From an Address Delivered in Historic Faneuil Hall, Bos- 
ton, 3Iass., September 3, 1915 

Kansas remembers lluit it is the child of Massachusetts. 

And I hope you think that the progress of Kansas does 

.honor to its parentage. It is a grateful and worthy child, 

now grown to vigorous and powerful manhood and doing 

its full share in the great family of states. Such a cordial 



THE WORST HUMAN SLAVERY 377 

welcome as this to one of her sons makes me feel that you 
are pleased to acknowledge the relationship. 

Whittier's Kansas emig-rant came from Massachusetts to 
rear that homestead of the free of which we now have so 
many in Kansas, occupied, as I believe, by the happiest, 
the most uniformly prosperous, the most industrious, am- 
bitious, forward-looking people on earth. 

Of all historic places, we in Kansas particularly venerate 
this fine old hall. We consider it one of our ancestral 
places. I feel that it is a distinction to be permitted to 
speak in it. 

It seems in keeping with the hallowed traditions of this 
spot, where American liberty was cradled, where were held 
some of the first public meetings in America to protest 
against human slavery, that this large audience should 
have assembled to hear what Kansas has done for prohibi- 
tion and what prohibition and equal suffrage have done, 
and are doing, for Kansas. 

These are but other forms of that human liberty to which 
the colonists of Massachusetts dedicated and consecrated 
this fine old building. I question if the thralldom of drink, 
with all its terrible and far-reaching consequences, is not 
the worst human slavery of all, a slavery from which we 
are happily and forever free in Kansas and are hoping and 
wishing that soon you and every other state may be. We 
have yet to get this great blessing across the Delaware 
which Washington crossed to defeat a much lesser enemy 
of his country. 

I am not a politician, nor an orator. It is simply as a 
plain-speaking business man that I have come before you 
to tell you something about prohibition as I kiiow it and 
as we know it in Kansas. 

AS A BUSINESS AND A SOCIAL PROPOSITION. 

Prohibition promotes wealth and industry. The New 
York Journal of Commerce and Finance said the other 
day that Kansas is the wealthiest state in the Union per 



378 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

capita. On the basis of wealth assessed for taxation the 
average wealth per capita in Kansas is $1,629.61. The 
second state is Massachusetts with a per capita wealth of 
$1,353.47, or nearly 20 per cent less. 

In assessed valuation, prohibition Kansas not only is the 
richest state, but the assessed value of wealth is twice as 
high in Kansas as in the United States as a whole. It is 
of record that no state in the Union has a higher per capita 
of wealth or a lower per capita of liquor consumption. 

The per capita liquor consumption in the whole country 
is $21. In Kansas it is $3.04. Thus Kansas saves 30 mil- 
lion dollars every year directly thru prohibition. The 
indirect gain is not subject to computation, but is certainly 
greater still. 

Kansas is not usually counted among the great manu- 
facturing and industrial states, and it cheerfully admits 
that agriculture is its chief resource, but Kansas by the 
last census, was the 14th manufacturing state, and its 
manufactured output was larger in value in proportion to 
the people employed in manufacturing enterprises than 
that of any other state except one. The Santa Fe railroad 
says that labor is more efficient in Kansas than in other 
states traversed by this great system. 

Kansas under prohibition has "reduced the percentage 
of insanity, emptied her jails and prisons and sold her 
poor farms." 

Insanity due to intemperance has been reduced to 3 per 
cent. The average for tlie country is 10 per cent. 

New York has just twice as many insane in proportion 
to population as Kansas. New York is the insanest state. 
Wisconsin is second. 

Thirty-two counties in Kansas abandoned their public 
farms last year. According to the latest report of our 
State Board of Control only 898 paupers were being cared 
for at county institutions. 

The prison rate for the entire country is 121 to the 
100,000 of ])()])ulation. In Kansas it is 91. The report of 



IMPROVES PERSONAL CREDIT 379 

Kansas' State Board of Control shows that 37 per cent of 
the prisoners received at our State Penitentiary are ' ' float- 
ers" who have wandered into Kansas from other states. 

EFFECT ON WEALTH AND PERSONAL CREDIT. 

We are told by the kings of finance in Wall Street that 
Kansas is today the most prosperous state in the Union. 
This is true. We have 230 millions of surplus wealth piled 
in our banks and savings institutions and this amount has 
more than doubled under prohibition. But better and 
nobler than all this material success is the high standard 
of citizenship, the fine spirit of justice and fairness that 
animates the soul of every true Kansan with a little more 
fervor, I am sometimes tempted to think, than the citizen 
of any other state. 

When Kansas began its rigid enforcement of the law, a 
great and a wonderful change was effected in personal 
credit. Butchers and grocers found that the men who 
were "dead beats" under the saloon's influence, became 
debtors of reliability and good standing, and that bad ac- 
counts were a rarity. Garnishment cases virtually disap- 
peared from the courts. 

Taking the average expenditure for liquor in the "wet" 
states, as a basis of comparison, Kansas is found to be sav- 
ing more than 30 million dollars every year on this one 
item, because prohibition has made its drink bill 85 per 
cent less than theirs. The amount of this saving goes into 
better home living. Ninety-six of Kansas' 105 counties 
haven't such a thing as a common drunkard. 

Yet we do have violations of the prohibitory law, just 
as you have violations of your laws, but mainly they occur 
in the border counties where Kansas adjoins "wet" states 
and "bootleggers" operate across the line. License New 
Jersey, with about the same population as prohibition Kan- 
sas and prohibition Maine combined, in three years paid 
3I/2 million dollars in liquor taxes to the United States 



380 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

g:overnment. During the same three years Kansas and 
Maine together paid only $102,508. 

From reports made to the county clerks, under the 
Mahin law, we know that the consumption of liquor per 
capita in Kansas amounts to $3.04. For the nation as a 
whole the amount is $21. Can anyone ask for stronger 
evidence that prohibition prohibits? And this is abso- 
lutely the smallest item in the long list of its benefits. 

COMPARING A WET WITH A DRY STATE. 

A comparison of Kansas, with its next neighbor, Mis- 
souri, a saloon and local o])tion state, is strikingly favor- 
able to state-wide prohibition. Note these figures : 

Missouri Kansas 

Age of till' states (years) 94 rA 

Population 3,300,000 1,690,000 

Saloons 4.000 

Per f-apita expenditure for liquor $24.00 $1.48 

Criminals to .3.000 population 10 1 

Bank deposits per capita $20.00 $140.00 

Assessed property valuation per capita $300.00 $1,700.00 

Automobiles to every 100 farmers 1 24 

Liquor crazes few Kansans. The percentage of insanity 
in Kan.sas due to liquor is only 3.2 and most of these cases 
have come in from wet states. In Massachusetts, Virginia, 
Illinois and New York, "wet" states, the percentage runs 
from 8.2 to 14.8 per cent. As Kansas laws compel state 
care or maintenance of every person adjudged insane, Kan- 
sas apparently has a higher percentage of insanity than 
some of the "wet" states, a circumstance eagerly seized 
upon by the brewers' press bureau to prove that prohibi- 
tion has done it and that drink and dissipation promote 
sanity and clean living. 

The crime bill is our greatest burden in the United 
States. Our greatest public debt maker is the saloon 
license. In 1910 the rate of commitments to prison in the 
United States was 520. In Kansas it was only 200. 

It is still the custom of wet communities to pave the 



BANEFUL INFLUENCE OF SOME CITIES 381 

streets and roads with fines from vice resorts, while these 
resorts pave the way to perdition for the young people of 
those communities. 

The cities of Kansas that have received no revenue what- 
ever from vice have a lower tax rate than those cities which 
in the old days stuck to the last to the license-fining sys- 
tem. Today there is no such thing as a slum or licensed 
red-light district in any Kansas city. Nowhere in all the 
civilized world are moral conditions cleaner and better 
than in prohibition Kansas. 

A village, a town, or a city is a home on a large scale 
for the community. It is made up of the smaller homes 
of families. Its stores and business houses are there to 
supply the needs of these homes and the homes of the coun- 
tryside surrounding the community. 

"What do you think of a vice district in such a place, 
sanctioned by law? 

The town with a vice district is no place in which to rear 
bo3"s and girls. 

WHEN SALOONS GO THE REDLIGHT LEAVES. 

A redlight town is no fit place and no safe place for 
young men and young women to live. Its influence, even, 
is degrading to mature men and women. 

Permitting a fearful cancer of this kind to exist in any 
community carries with it a far more fearful penalty. It 
entails generations of suffering. Its contamination ruins 
thousands of innocent lives. Its human wreckage fills hos- 
pitals, asylums and graveyards. The blight of it reaches 
everywhere in town and country. No community no mat- 
ter how small or isolated, but has felt this baneful influ- 
ence and has seen some of its boys and girls fall into the 
traps of the white slavers. 

All this, that under the license system that community 
may wring a pitifully small amount of revenue from the 
doomed women of its redlight — some of them its own 



382 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

daughters. Can there be a more appalling, a more fatuous 
wickedness ? 

When we banished the saloon in Kansas, the licensed 
segregated vice district went with it. Then we realized, 
as we never had before, that the saloon was and had 
always been the breeder of the gambler and the prosti- 
tute. The gambling house and. the house of prostitu- 
tion are so closely connected and so dependent on the 
saloon, that when the saloon is compelled to move out of a 
community they must go, too, as they have gone in our 
state. As Governor Stubbs, a former governor of Kansas 
has said before me, prohibition is the doctrine of self 
defense. 

Let me tell you whether you have prohibition or not, that 
the "good" men and women of every town containing a 
redlight district are the ones to blame. If they permit the 
licensing or the segregation of this pollution at their very 
doors they may be sure that sooner or later, whether they 
will it or not, it will cross their own thresholds. I can 
give you no truer warning. 

This is the age of conservation. A conservation policy 
that does not conserve nor promote nor foster nor protect 
the health, thrift and happiness of the American home — 
the source of all our strength and vigor as a nation — is 
blind folly, and an unspeakable sham. The saloon is the 
father of our idiots and imbeciles in America, the source 
of nearly all our human wreckage. The drunken father 
robs his offspring of tliat which is dearer than life itself 
and which is every child's birthright — willpower, intelli- 
gence, reason ! Then why should we permit the institution 
to exist that makes the creation of drunken fathers a busi- 
ness and which is the recognized source of nine-tenths of 
all the world's misery, and wretchedness? 

CITIES DO NOT MISS S-VLOON REVENUE. 

The last defense of the saloon is that saloon revenue helps 
pay the taxes. It does, but it does it at a cost infinitely 



OUR GREATEST DEBT MAKER 383 

greater, a cost actually paid in dollars and cents as well 
as in blood, bones and tears. The saloon, wherever it exists, 
is our greatest public debt-maker, our greatest public 
burden. 

After the saloons were driven out of Kansas City, Kan- 
sas, the state's largest city, for the first time in twenty 
years that municipality made no debt for current expenses. 
And this without saloon revenue as its mayor, U. S. Guyer, 
has recorded in a signed statement. 

The first year the saloons were effectively suppressed in 
Kansas City, it is recorded by a former attorney general 
af Kansas, that the cost of public prosecutions, which the 
public had to bear, fell off $25,000. Another saving was 
made of $25,000 by a reduction of the police force. How 
much was saved the merchants in the better collection of 
accounts, and how much in other ways was saved the people, 
cannot be estimated. 

This same attorney general, now a member of the Su- 
preme Court of Kansas, was an assistant attorney general 
when the law enforcement campaign began in Kansas City, 
Kansas. Kansas City, Kansas, is a city of 100,000 people, 
just across the line from the larger city of the same name 
in Missouri. He relates that within a few days, a large 
delegation of Kansas City politicians came to Topeka to 
persuade the attorney general to stop his crusade against 
these joints, as it was their opinion the city could not live 
without saloon revenue. Also it was urged that the closing 
of the saloons was driving all kinds of business to Kansas 
City, Mo., the "wide-open" city, and that it would cost 
the party the approaching municipal election. These men 
were informed by the attorney general that the law would 
have to be enforced, that there would be no retreat. 

A year later when another attorney general succeeded 
him in office, sympathizers with the liquor traffic circu- 
lated the report that the new attorney general would not 
continue the policy of vigorous law enforcement. It was 
then that this same delegation which a year before had 



384 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

predicted destruction and disaster would follow the ban- 
ishing of the saloon from Kansas City, again visited the 
office of the attorney general, this time to say to that offi- 
cial : "For God's sake! Don't let the old rotten order 
of things return to Kansas City. We have got away from 
it and are well rid of it and the town was never so pros- 
perous as now." 

BANK DEPOSITS AND BUSINESS INCREASED. 

Among tliese men were Benjamin Schnerle and Myron 
A. Waterma)!, the leading bankers, who testified that the 
closing of the saloons had marvelously increased their bank 
deposits. There were real estate dealers who reported an 
increase of hundreds of workmen among home and lot buy- 
ers ; school enrollment had jumped ; dry goods men and 
grocers noted an improvement in business and that the 
people were paying bills more promptly than ever before. 

It was a revelation to them.. 

When the saloon was abolished in AA^ichita, now a city 
of more than 60,000 people, the weekly clearance increased 
w^ithin tJiree years from $1,400,000 to $3,200,000. 

So far as I am able to discover, Topeka, the capital city of 
Kansas, does a bigger retail business, has more home-own- 
ing citizens and a smaller police force, than any other city 
of its size in the world. 

The first ten years following the stringent enforcement 
of the law, the deposits in Kansas banks increased from 
69 million dollars to 189 million dollars and the state's 
taxable property increased at the rate of 120 million dol- 
lars annually. These figures seem hardly believable, but 
they are accurate. 

BOSTON BUSINESS MEN URGED TO VISIT KANSAS. 

IIoM'cver, I wish to propose something tliat possibly will 
be still more convincing to the citizens of Massachusetts. 
I cordially and earnestly invite your Boston Chamber of 



UNFAIR FIGHT BY SALOONS 385 

Commerce to send a dozen of its best and keenest business 
men to investigate conditions in Kansas with particular 
reference to the results it has achieved with prohibition. 
Also, I ask that your Chamber send with them the greatest 
efficiency expert you have in Boston, or in New England, 
to visit our factories and business institutions and report 
on the quantity and quality of the output, under similar 
working conditions, as compared with that of any, or of 
the average, "wet" community. All Kansas will welcome 
them, and give them every assistance to ascertain the actual 
facts, for our people wish the world to know of the bless- 
ings and the benefits of prohibition as they have found 
them. 

There also is another reason why we should court such 
an unbiased investigation by men of ripe business experi- 
ence, unimpeachable integrity and high standing in your 
community. Kansas, under the enforcement of her pro- 
hibitory law, has made such marvelous advancement in 
every avenue of progress and well-being that the power- 
fully entrenched liquor interests, alarmed lest all the states, 
or the nation, follow its example, have made Kansas the 
target of their various publicity bureaus. They have 
covered the entire United States with pamphlets and re- 
ports in which statistics are adroitly massed, manufactured 
and distorted to prove that Kansas actually is damaged by 
prohibition and that there can be no real prosperity, no 
actual progress, without the saloon. One side of their 
argument is as convincing as the other, but the plausible 
and apparently conclusive and authoritative array of their 
alleged statistics, puzzle many persons who realize at the 
same time that they cannot be true or entirely true. 

The liquor interests do not fight fairly, and because they 
cannot, they resort to falsehood and innuendo and subter- 
fuge. What else is left to them? Obviously there is one 
thing, and one alone, that the liquor interests can do, and 
that is to wade into the statistical masses of the census, 



386 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

trusting to the confusing power of twisted figures to make 
black appear white in the eyes of the average man. 

HOW LIQUOR INTERESTS USE STATISTICS. 

It is well known to those who have looked into the matter 
that no dependence can be placed upon figures and illustra- 
tions used by the liquor interests. Their literary methods 
well illustrate the truth of the familiar saying that figures 
do not lie, but liars do figure. A Liquor Dealers Associa- 
tion of Rome, N. Y., recently said very piously that **God 
gave us free will and liberty of choice." Quite so. And 
the liquor business exercises its God-given liberty in lying 
about Kansas. 

A sample of its methods may be seen in the use made of 
certain statistics. The liquor interests have declared that 
Kansas has more insane patients in its state hospitals than 
Wisconsin in proportion to population. That is true, but 
they omit to say that Wisconsin has, especially in its more 
populous counties, a system of county hospitals for the 
insane. 

It sounds like a joke when it is charged that Kansas is 
not progressive, but the liquor people say that Kansas is 
behind some other states in its laws to protect working 
women in their wages, their hours of labor and in the con- 
ditions under which they work. I cheerfully admit that 
Kansas is at fault here. But I charge that the liquor in- 
terests when they argue this way forget the long list of 
laws enacted for the social and industrial welfare of her 
people, especially of her women and children. In this 
respect she is certainly not behind more than one or two 
other states. 

And I cheerfully make the admission that Kansas has 
been remiss in providing protection for working women, 
because I do not assert, and no champion of prohibition 
asserts, that prohibition automatically solves all a state's 
social and industrial problems. And I further cheerfully 



PROHIBITION HELPS OTHER REFORMS 387 

admit that it is quite to be expected that some persons who 
believe in prohibition may, when they obtain it, sink into 
the belief that all other needed lesser reforms will follow 
automatically in its wake. 

But it cannot be truthfully said that Kansas has not 
been alert to the need of other reforms. Indeed prohibi- 
tion makes other reforms easier of attainment. 

Do the liquor interests really believe that the open saloon 
w^ould be a good thing for Kansas? Most emphatically 
they do not. I saw a liquor advertisement recently which 
declared that the whisky advertised brings "health, wealth 
and happiness." Does anyone believe that? Do the dis- 
tillers of that whisky themselves believe it? 

When those opposed to prohibition point to the fact that 
in the matter of laws protecting working women Kansas is 
behind some other states, do they mean we should infer 
that the best way to protect the working women of Kansas 
is to go back to the open saloon? 

When they seek, unsuccessfully, to prove that Kansas 
suffers by comparison with Wisconsin in the number of 
its insane, do they seriously propose the open saloon as a 
cure for insanity? 

EXAMPLES OF ANTI-PROHIBITION ARGUMENTS. 

When a liquor champion recently asserted that 15 states 
have a rate of divorce lower than Kansas, what did he 
mean ? Did he mean that the open saloon in Kansas would 
be a cure, in whole or in part, for the breaking up of 
homes? He overlooked the fact that the divorce rate is 
higher in 32 other states, and that in nine states drunken- 
ness is not a cause for divorce at all — or did he overlook 
it? One cannot always be sure. 

As a sample of the sort of argument sought to be "put 
over" by the liquor interests, I direct attention to the 
article published in the Saturday Evening Post a few 



388 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

months ago by an official representing the brewery inter- 
ests, in which as evidence of unusual drunkenness in the 
city of Emporia, he "quoted" from the Emporia Gazette 
of a certain date. Later it was proved that the article 
pretended to be quoted did not appear in the Gazette on 
the date named nor at any other time. 

Examples of anti-prohibition arguments are frequent in 
all states in which the question is to be voted upon. Ad- 
vertisements from several such states, such as Colorado, 
Washington and California, were clipped and sent to me 
last year. The liquor dealers used space in a California 
newspaper to publish the statement that the amount of 
liquor consumed in Kansas is 15 million gallons. In a 
Washington paper the figures were given as 3 million 
quarts, or one-sixtieth as much. Both figures are wide of 
the facts, but the liquor interests are usually weak on facts. 

I have laid stress upon the testimony of the people of 
Kansas themselves. Let rae give this testimony in a little 
detail : 

Every governor of Kansas for 20 years has said that pro- 
hibition is a great success. 

Every state official who has spoken says that prohibition 
succeeds. 

More than 700 Kansas editors and newspaper men in 
state convention, unanimously endorsed prohibition. 

Every political party in Kansas favors the prohibitory 
law. 

No minister in Kansas ever opens his mouth in favor of 
returning to the licensed saloon, nor any teacher. 

TJie mothers of Kansas say they are satisfied to have 
their boys grow up without seeing the open saloon. They 
are not demanding that saloons be licensed in Kansas. 

The president of the Kansas Retailers' Association says 
that prohibition pays. 

The Temperance Society of the Methodist church asked 



BENEFITS THE WHOLE STATE 389 

bank presidents in Kansas what they thought of prohibi- 
tion. One hundred and sixty-six favored the law, while 
only six expressed doubts of its wisdom. 

During its last session the legislature by unanimous vote 
in both Houses went upon record in a series of strong reso- 
lutions telling what Prohibition Has Done for Kansas and 
emphatically approving it. 

Saloon cities which send out advertising literature do 
not boast of the large number of saloons within their bor- 
ders, but cities in Kansas put "no saloons" first. 

The desire of the people of Kansas is that you shall hear 
and know the truth about Kansas under prohibition and 
then draw what conclusions may to you seem warranted. 

KANSAS didn't MAKE UP ITS MIND AT ONCE. 

This is true, that everything that has been done by pro- 
hibition in Kansas has been good. It might conceivably be 
true that prohibition had done some ill to the state, but 
that the balance is on the right side. But this simply is 
not the case. No one can truthfully say that the Kansas 
prohibitory law, as enforced during the past decade, has 
been anything but a benefit to the state of Kansas. And 
it is almost correct to say that no one in Kansas has any 
other idea of the situation. I admit that at times, in the 
past, state and local authorities in Kansas have been remiss 
in enforcing the law. This has been urged as an objection 
to the law. Queer reasoning this. Just as queer as the 
reasoning of those who assert that prohibitory laws are 
faulty because there are powerful, persistent and un- 
scrupulous agencies bent on breaking down these laws. 

Isn't it an argument of tremendous significance that the 
sentiment in favor of resubmission is practically non-exist- 
ent in Kansas? No one pretends anything else. No polit- 
ical party in Kansas dares any longer to advocate resub- 
mission of the liquor question. One of the great political 
parties continued for 20 years after the adoption of the 



390 PROHIBITNON IN KANSAS 

prohibitory provision of the state constitution to declare 
against sumptuary laws. But this party in its last state 
platform not only championed prohibition in Kansas, but 
went upon record unequivocally in favor of nation-wide 
prohibition. 

Altho the political party referred to is not the one 
to which I belong, I do not question its sincerity now, nor 
do I question the sincerity of its old-time platform con- 
demning prohibition and calling for its repeal. The change 
in this party simply reflects the growth of opinion on this 
question during the last 34 years under actual experience 
in a prohibition state. When Kansas adopted prohibition 
by popular vote and by action of its legislature, sentiment 
in the state was very evenly divided. I believe no one now 
would assert that 10 per cent of the people of Kansas desire 
a return to the saloon and the brewers. 

The significance of this growth of opinion is plain. 
Doesn't it show what prohibition has done for Kansas? 
Are not the people of Kansas better qualified to pass 
judgment upon the merits of prohibition in Kansas than 
the people of Wisconsin or New York, who, let us admit, 
are equally sincere in thinking that prohibition works ill 
in Kansas and would work ill in those states? 

The voters of St. Louis were nearly 10 to 1 against pro- 
hibition in 1912. The voters of Kansas have gone on rec- 
ord even more emphatically in two successive primary elec- 
tions against resubmission as represented in the guberna- 
torial aspirations of a strong candidate. Are the people 
of Kansas or of St. Louis better able to decide the merits 
of the prohibition question in Kansas or elsewhere? 

HOW PROHIBITION CONVERTS THE DOUBTERS. 

It is my belief that the people of St. Louis, intelligent 
people as they are, voted against their own interests, most 
of them in all sincerity. They did not know what they 
were doing. They were deceived. And the good people 



STANDS THE TEST OF TIME 391 

of any city or state who are opposed to prohibition are 
deceived, deceived too, tho they do not know it, by the 
specious arguments of the liquor interests, with whose in- 
terests and methods, certainly, they are not in sympathy. 

The people of Kansas are for prohibition because they 
have lived under prohibition for a generation. That is 
the situation in a sentence. The people of other states, 
most of them, do not believe in prohibition because they 
have had a different experience, an experience which does 
not qualify them, whatever their virtues and their intelli- 
gence may be, to decide the question correctly. 

I have lived in Topeka for 30 years. During all that 
time I have been in the publishing business. I have there- 
fore had opportunities for wide personal acquaintance. I 
know many of the older citizens of this city, men for whom 
I have always had the highest regard, who voted against 
prohibition in the fall of 1880, but now they are for it 
without reservation. On the other hand, I do not know of 
one such respected citizen in Topeka or elsewhere in the 
state who voted for prohibition then who would vote 
against it now. It must be due to what prohibition has 
done for Kansas. 

I know many men in Topeka and elsewhere in Kansas 
who have come to this state in recent years. I mean men 
of the "good citizen" type. These men, many of them, 
were against prohibition and were disposed to sneer at it. 
Almost without exception this disbelief in the prohibitory 
law sloughs off, the subject does not know how. Under 
prohibition, as he sees it in actual operation, his views 
undergo a change, usually a very speedy change. These 
men recognize the fact that before they came to Kansas 
they did not know what they were talking about when they 
denounced prohibition. Some of these men, these good 
citizens, have themselves been moderate drinkers. Some 
of them are still moderate drinkers. But I know many 



392 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

such who are as strongly enthusiastic for prohibition as 
any life-long abstainer or professional temperance worker. 

KANSAS LEADING IN POPULATION GAINS. 

Of course there are men in Kansas, a few of them, who 
do not believe in prohibition, but, as a rule, they are not 
the class of men whose opinions insjJire respect. There are 
some in Kansas, as in every state — verj'- few in Kansas 
fortunately — to whom the open saloon is a desirable insti- 
tution. Some of these make a great deal of noise in Kansas 
and elsewhere, but are their opinions valuable, no matter 
how speciously dressed? 

It is, I suppose, quite true, as is often declared, that 
some persons do not come to Kansas to live because of pro- 
hibition. No one denies that there are persons of that type. 
To say that Kansas is perfectly willing that they shall go 
to other states is an understatement of the true feeling 
of our people. The man who will not make a home in 
Kansas for his wife and children because Kansas is a dry 
state is usually an undesirable citizen. Kansas could well 
afford to pay such undesirables to stay away. 

On the other hand, I know many fine men and women 
in Topeka who have come here to live and to rear and edu- 
cate their children because in this city there are no saloons. 
Kansas and Topeka are perfectly content to be shunned 
by the other class of citizens and sought by this class. The 
liquor interests declare that Kansas made a slow growth 
in population from 1900 to 1910. "Well, the relative growth 
in population in Kansas was greater than in Missouri, 
Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and only 
2 per cent lower than Illinois, notwithstanding its large 
city, Chicago. 

The argument is all on one side. It's like virtue, about 
which it has been wisely said that "there is nothing to be 
set over against, it. " That is to say, you can argue for a 
week in favor of doing sometliing that is wrong, but at the 



WHY PEOPLE LIKE KANSAS 393 

end of the week you haven't even begun to justify doing 
the wrong thing. 

As to arguments drawn from Kansas against prohibi- 
tion, there simply are no such arguments. 

If it is good to live in Kansas it is because the people of 
Kansas have made it so. Kansas people never have dodged 
a difficulty nor refused to face an issue. Kansas now is 
a good place in which to live largely because thirty-five 
years ago we dared to make the open saloon an outlaw, 
because we were not afraid to attack a curse as ancient as 
human history and put it from us forever. And now that 
national prohibition and world-wide prohibition are com- 
ing just as surely as tomorrow's sunrise, Kansas has done, 
is doing, and will do, more to bring this great blessing to 
you and to others, than any other state. 

I freely confess I am proud to be the chief executive of 
such a state ; and especially proud to be the first native 
Kansan to become its governor; the first to be chosen by 
the votes of Kansas women. It is an honor any man may 
be proud to claim. 

WHOLESOME EFFECT OF EQUAL SUFFRAGE IN KANSAS. 

The saloon never has been found on the right side of 
any question. The most hostile and bitter protests against 
woman suffrage always have come from the vice and saloon 
element — the evil, corrupt and roughneck element in poli- 
tics. This ill-smelling crowd has always fought for the 
sanctity and purity of the home by voting solidly and in- 
variably against woman suffrage. 

The adoption of woman suffrage in Kansas has made it 
easier to elect men of good moral character to office and 
harder to foist a man of shady reputation on the people. 
Election day in rural Kansas with the women voting, is 
more like a big neighborhood picnic than a political fight. 

The extension of equal suffrage to the women of Kansas 
has had immediate effect for good. 

It has impelled all political parties to include in their 



394 PROHIBITION IN KANSAS 

program and platform humanitarian projects and moral 
issues wiiich previously they had ignored. 

It has made imperative a more careful selection of nomi- 
nees. 

Already it is having wholesome effect in cleansing the 
state of spoilsman politics and in promoting higher ideals 
in public and private life. 

Kansas is proud of her new citizens and appreciates the 
great part they are taking in every movement which has 
for its purpose the betterment of the state. 

The immediate passage of wise, humane and beneficial 
laws for the safeguarding of children and the betterment 
of conditions of living, which followed the enacting of equal 
suffrage laws in Kansas, affords convincing proof that the 
enfranchising of American women is a most important step 
in the advancement of state and national progress. 

NATIONAL PROPIIBITION CERTAIN TO WIN. 

Complete victory may not come so early as many of us 
are hoping it will come. But no matter about that. We 
shall keep on fighting. The enemy is strong and resource- 
ful. In a meeting of the National Anti-Saloon League two 
years ago $30,000, seemingly a generous sum, was sub- 
scribed in 30 minutes to fight the liquor power. But the 
liquor power raised 4 million dollars with which to fight 
prohibition. This does not discourage us. It only nerves 
us to fight the harder. Neither 4 million dollars nor 400 
million dollars can stop the onward march of prohibition 
in this country. 

There is no complete and final solution of all social, 
moral and industrial problems, but national prohibition is 
the next great step to be taken in this country. "We know 
that the saloon is making more human wreckage than all 
other agencies. Why should we, an enlightened people, a 
scientifically informed nation, continue to license this great 
curse, knowing it to be our greatest enemy, our greatest 



SALOONS LEAD TO RUIN 395 

hindrance to national wellbeing, the greatest destroyer of 
thrift and happiness, the greatest promoter of vice, crime 
and disorder, the greatest menace to the life of every boy 
and girl in the land, the greatest source of expense in gov- 
ernment and its most corrupting influence ! Could any- 
thing be more reasonable, more sensible — more necessary 
— than national prohibition? 



RESULTS OF 34 YEARS OF PROHIBITION IN 

KANSAS. 

From an Add7'ess at the Nebraska Chautauqua Assembly, 
Lincoln, Neh., August 4, 1916. 

I hope that this fine audience of representative Nebraska 
people will not misconstrue my reasons for visiting the 
state to talk about "What Prohibition Has Done For Kan- 
sas." I do not come as a reformer nor as a Chautauqua 
orator. I am here upon invitation as a private citizen, 
whose interests, financial and sentimental, include Ne- 
braska within their scope. 

Nebraska is our sister state and very naturally we Kan- 
sans are interested in its progress. At times we have been 
a bit jealous of that progress, for certainly you have cause 
for congratulation upon the marvelous headway you have 
attained agriculturally, educationally and intellectually. I 
do not believe there are two states in the Union more nearly 
resembling each other than Nebraska and Kansas, and in 
saying this I compliment both. No man who sees and hears 
intelligently could ride across this beautiful state and not 
be impressed with the signs of advancement evident on 
every hand. This is not a mere platitude suited to this 
occasion. It is a self-evident fact as any observer can 
prove, Nebraska has advanced, I believe, as Kansas has 
done in all those things that go to make up a great state 



396 RESULTS OF PROHIBITION 

except in this one particular. It has not yet enacted a 
state-wjide prohibitory law, but it will do it, I believe, in 
the next election. 

The physical and moral value of prohibition need no 
longer be urged in presenting this subject for the consider- 
ation of most intelligent people. Public opinion thruout 
the world has made this unnecessary. The only question 
raised by doubters — some of whom are conscientious, if 
queer, in their reasoning — ^has to do with the economic or 
business viewpoint, and it is to answer this question that 
I have been asked to come to Nebraska to testify — to tell 
just "What Prohibition Has Done For Kansas." 

But now we see temperance, or let me say prohibition, 
so rapidly engaging the best thought of governments in 
every part of the world, that the liquor interests, driven 
to extremities, resort to the most daring misrepresentations 
of conditions in every state where the prohibitory law 
exists. This attitude has expressed itself in the most 
brazen mendacity, directed particularly at Kansas because 
Kansas is the first state most successfully to enforce the 
prohibitory law. Wherever that law is purposed, wherever 
it is about to be presented to the people for their considera- 
tion, there the liquor interests, thru their paid agents, will 
be found dragging out the same old tiresome, stereotyped 
falsehoods about Kansas — lies that have been proved lies 
time after time until the forces of decency grow weary of 
the repetition. 

When Nebraska adopts state-wide prohibition this fall — 
mind I do not say "if" — I say when Nebraska adopts this 
law in November its people may expect precisely the ex- 
perience thru which Kansas has passed and still is passing 
with full credit to its courageous people. You must be 
prepared for this. You must not falter in the coming years 
when you learn that insanity has increased suddenly in 
your state; that the poorhouses are filled to overflowing; 
that business depression is broadcast; that taxes have in- 
creased ; that crime has grown beyond the crime in any of 



THE LIBEL ON DECENCY 397 

the liquor states having twice your population. You must 
not be downcast when you hear that savings deposits have 
fallen off alarmingly ; that women and children cry in the 
streets for food ; that divorces have increased beyond the 
record at Reno; that Nebraska, in short, is going down to 
commercial and domestic decay because saloons have been 
closed and the breweries brew no more trouble. You will 
have to realize that this form of libel is the price you pay 
for decency. You will have to keep the traditional stiff 
upper lip with the knowledge in your minds and hearts 
that Right must and will prevail and that the forces of evil 
will perish just as surely as prohibition has lived and won 
in Kansas; just as surely as it has proved itself the great- 
est blessing that the patient and law abiding people of the 
great and much maligned state of Kansas have prized above 
every other statute for more than 30 years, a statute that 
never will be repealed. 

When I first went to Topeka there were 50 or 60 saloons. 
The jails were filled most of the time. The Daily Capital 
rarely had enough men to do its work the day after pay 
day. Indeed I got my first job on the Capital because too 
many of the printers were absent and the foreman was 
willing to take anyone. It was a wide-open town. Even 
up to 15 or 20 years ago I believe a majority of the leading 
business men favored high license under the impression 
that saloons were needed if the town was to be a live place, 
and especially for the revenue they contributed. But ulti- 
mately, thru a period of observation, of education, these 
business men learned that they might as wisely license 
morphine or cocaine. They discovered that their fears 
about revenues were groundless and that the town lived 
and prospered amazingly under the rule of decency. When 
I went to Topeka the men in my trade never had anything 
except trouble and unpaid bills and headaches. Now, the 
majority of the printers own their homes, many have motor 
cars; they have their vacations now, with their families; 
they are good citizens. Not two weeks ago a printer in the 



398 RESULTS OF PROHIBITION 

Daily Capital plant received a cheek for $10,000 from the 
Aetna Building & Loan Society representing his savings 
and interest. In the same plant, of which I am the owner, 
we have a savings society with more than a hundred mem- 
bers, which includes printers, pressmen and stereotypers, all 
of whom save a certain part of their wages every week. 
The number of arrests in Topeka for drunkenness has con- 
stantly decreased, tho our population is steadily increasing. 

As a strictly business proposition prohibition has paid 
big dividends in Kansas. Its strongest advocates in the 
state are the large employers of labor, the managers of the 
big railroad properties, and the labor organizations. More 
than 4,000 men are employed in the Santa Fe railway shops 
at Topeka — the driest city of its size in the world. Those 
shops maintain the highest degree of efficiency of any on 
the Santa Fe system. C. W. Kouns, the general manager, 
says the books show that they turn out more work, consist- 
ently and promptly the year round than any other railroad 
shops. Seventy-two per cent of the married men in these 
shops own their homes — a showing that cannot be equaled 
by any other railway town in America. 

On a dollar basis, merely, prohibition has paid. As to 
the domestic side the records of a survey show that the 
families of the shop men are, of course, in very much better 
condition than those in license states. Naturally they have 
more money to spend. There is far less family trouble. 
There are fewer divorces. The children and the wives wear 
better clothes, they live happier lives. The fathers' earn- 
ings go to the family support instead of to the saloons. 

We are not paying dearly for this decency. The state 
tax in Kansas is only $1.25 a thousand, the lowest, with 
two exceptions, in the United States. Compared with like 
cities Topeka 's taxes are no higher and certainly are not 
sufficiently burdensome to bring a protest from the people. 
Any student of such facts knows that no saloon ever con- 
tributed enough taxes to pay for the trouble it caused — 
no one ever heard of liquor interests producing enough 



NO SLUM DISTRICTS NOW 399 

revenue to pay for the police and the jails and the courts 
needed to hold the criminals the saloons create. It is still 
the custom of wet communities, in wet or semi-wet states, 
to pave the streets and roads with fines from vice resorts, 
while these resorts pave the way to perdition for the young 
people, but the cities of Kansas that have received no 
revenue whatever from vice have a lower tax rate than 
those cities which in the old days stuck to the last to the 
license-fining system. More than 5 million dollars was 
spent by the cities of Kansas in the year ending June 30, 
1916, for paving, electric lights, parks, waterworks and 
other municipal improvements, but not a dollar was con- 
tributed by the liquor traffic or commercialized vice. To- 
day there is no such thing as a slum or licensed red-light 
district in any city in Kansas. Nowhere in all the civilized 
world are moral conditions cleaner and better than in pro- 
hibition Kansas. 

Prohibition has been in operation 34 years in Kansas. 
If the people were not satisfied with the law and the con- 
ditions it has produced they certainly could have changed 
long ago. It seems to me — as the lawyers say — that the 
people themselves are the best evidence. The surest way 
to bring about the repeal of an objectionable law is to en- 
force it. We enforce the prohibitory law in Topeka and 
in the state and I have seen no disposition to repeal it. 
Certainly not on the score of taxes. , 

Enemies of prohibition also assert that it is a failure 
because the law is sometimes violated. No one, not even 
the most ardent prohibitionist, will contend that the law 
is never violated. But I do contend, and the records will 
bear me out in the statement, that the prohibitory law is 
enforced just as faithfully and just as effectively as any 
other law on the Kansas statutes. There has not been an 
open saloon or drinking place in Kansas for more than ten 
years. The clandestine sale of liquor has been reduced to 
the minimum. In my opinion there is not a license state in 
the Union that does not consume five times as much intoxi- 



400 RESULTS OF PROHIBITION 

eating liquor as prohibition Kansas. If Missouri on the 
east and Nebraska on the north were dry states, the boot- 
legging business in Kansas would be solved at once. 

In order to get specific information on this subject I 
addressed an inquiry a few months ago to the county at- 
torneys of the state, who are charged with the prosecution 
of violators of this law. One hundred and two out of 105 
counties replied to the effect that the success of the pro- 
hibitory law in their sections had long ago been established ; 
that its strict enforcement was expected as a matter of 
course, and that it was enforced in the same way and with 
the same efficiency and success as other laws. 

Liquor in adjoining states, and the annual influx of 
harvest hands give our courts the larger part of the crim- 
inal cases they try. This is not merely an assertion. The 
records show it. Such malefactors are not citizens of Kan- 
sas. Another thing: When the liquor interests proclaim 
how many prisoners Kansas has to account for, don't forget 
that this state has, at Leavenworth, the largest federal 
prison in the world and that its inmates are from every 
state in the Union. Remember, also, that Kansas never 
hangs or electrocutes its prisoners. Naturally our life 
prisoners accumulate more rapidly than in states where 
capital punishment is the rule. It is worth remembering, 
too, that out of 890 prisoners in the Kansas state peniten- 
tiary only 12 are women. 

In the Montana campaign the liquor interests are giving 
wide publicity to a newspaper statement which they con- 
tend shows that prohibition has caused Kansas to pursue 
a niggardly policy in appropriating money for the main- 
tenance of its institutions. One writer said that "the ap- 
propriations for 1915 exceeded those of 1903 by 91 per 
cent." The liquor folks have answered their own state- 
ment. No state which increases the amount appropriated 
for the upkeep of its institutions 91 per cent in 12 years 
can be accused of being stingy. And these appropriations 



KANSAS IS NOT STINGY 401 

have not given Kansas a high tax rate as I have shown — 
only $1,25 a thousand, the lowest in America with two 
exceptions. 

They never forget the paupers — these saloon writers. 
They are particularly familiar with poverty. The traffic 
they defend has created most of it. Kansas, one of the 
statistical jugglers says, had 908 paupers in 1915. The 
state spent $607,500 for the care of the poor, he says. Kan- 
sas pleads guilty to spending this money, and gladly. A 
large part of this amount was expended under the pro- 
visions of the mothers' pension law, an act authorizing 
county officers to extend aid to poor and needy mothers 
and widows, who from one cause or another have been left 
without means of supporting themselves and their minor 
children. This report does not mean that pauperism has 
increased in Kansas. But it does show that prohibition 
breeds a desire to help the unfortunate. 

But of all the trivial absurdities set forth by the liquor 
interests about Kansas, probably the most foolish was the 
assertion that the people's views on prohibition were sup- 
pressed by the newspapers. The newspapers certainly 
could not interfere with the people's vote on this question 
in November, 1914. Kansas, as doubtless you know, uses 
the Australian form of ballot. The vote is secret. No one 
can possibly know how a person votes once he is in the 
booth "alone," as someone said, "with his ballot, his pencil 
and his God." In the election to which I have referred 
one candidate ran for governor on a resubmission platform 
— in favor of letting the people vote on an amendment to 
repeal the prohibitory law. This candidate was unable to 
get on the ticket of any political party, and was accord- 
ingly compelled to run on an independent ticket. He re- 
ceived about one vote in ten. That is what Kansas people 
think of prohibition. There is no "liquor question" in 
Kansas. Having utterly abolished the saloon, Kansas is 
rid of the perpetual agitation which is troubling every state 



402 RESULTS OF PROHIBITION 

except Kansas. No question is settled until it is settled 
right. 

But why go any farther? If you wish to see the most 
startling contrast between prohibition and liquor, an object 
lesson you will never forget, I suggest that you visit, some 
day, the street in the West Bottoms called "State Line," 
between Kansas City, Mo., and Kansas City, Kansas. On 
the Missouri side you will find the ground occupied with 
saloons and other dens of vice — ^the lowest in the state. On 
the opposite side of the street, just across an imaginary 
boundary line, are industrial plants, sanitary structures, 
manufacturing properties paying big returns on invest- 
ments, providing labor for thousands. And you will find 
that one of the rules of those industries is that no employe 
may cross the line — -the deadline — for the purpose of en- 
tering a saloon while on duty. Drinking is not allowed. 
From that street, which is well named the dead-line, the Mis- 
souri police take hundreds of derelicts every year — wrecks 
of humanity, and many a murder has been committed there. 
On the Kansas side the police have little to do except to 
watch for the bootleggers. On one side is decency — on the 
other is death. 



EFFECT OF PROHIBITION IN BUILDING 
SOLDIERS. 

From an Address at Wellington, Kan., November 17, 1917. 

When I was at Camp Funston, General Wood told me 
that in his twenty-five years of experience in the army, he 
never had seen anything like the revolution that had been 
effected in morale and discipline by establishing the dry 
zone. He said that under ordinary circumstances the 
guard house in such a camp as Camp Funston would have 
an average population of 200. Then, turning to the tele- 



PROHIBITION IMPROVES SOLDIERS 403 

phone, he made inquiry as to the number of men undci' 
arrest, and learned there was just one. Just one man in 
the guard house, out of 35,000 soldiers, and his offense was 
not drunkenness, not brawling, but a small infraction of 
some little rule, 

"Nothing like such order," said General Wood to me, 
''ever has been known before in a military camp. I 
find," he went on to say, "that the Kansas boys and men 
grade far higher in morals, obedience and stamina than 
the men of other camps in times past. The percentage of 
vice diseases among them is the smallest that has ever be- 
fore been found in a camp, and the discipline is the best 
I have ever seen. We attribute this," said the general, 
"to the dry zone order, and to Kansas prohibition, which 
prevent the sale of liquor. These Kansas boys were brought 
up in clean atmosphere — they started right." 

But what General Wood said to me when I came away, 
I think is the very finest, and the very highest tribute that 
ever has been paid to Kansas. 

"You can tell the Kansas people for me," said he, "that 
they have got the finest, the cleanest, the healthiest, and 
the most vigorous soldiers in point of endurance, we ever 
have seen. The official records show this." 

Doesn't that repay you for everything you have done in 
the past to strengthen the enforcement of the prohibitory 
law? 



THE FRIGHTFUL TOLL OF DRINK. 

An Address Delivered Before the W. C. T. U. Convention 
at Topeka, Kan., April 13, 1917. 

In the town of Joplin, in the brewery-ridden state of 
Missouri, an employer of labor has printed in large type 
across all his pay checks the words, "Not Negotiable in 
Any Saloon." 

This man, whose name, by the way, is White, had noted 



404 FRIGHTFUL TOLL OF DRINK 

that the checks paid to many of his men bore the indorse- 
ment of some Joplin saloon keeper on their backs when 
returned to him by the bank. 

He discovered also that the men whose checks were 
cashed in this manner were not as well-to-do as the other 
men, that they were harassed by debt, and that the quality 
and quantity of their work varied greatly. 

Then he bethought himself of the simple expedient I 
have spoken of, for correcting the evil. 

The next pay day, when the drinkers got their checks 
from the cashier, there was surprise and something like 
consternation and anger among them. 

' ' Gee ! the boss is keeping tab on us, ' ' said some of the 
men. Others resented what they considered an infraction 
of tlieir liberty and personal rights — the right to spend 
their earnings when and where they saw fit. 

"But it doesn't say that," said several of their fellows, 
who were listening to this side of the argument, "it simply 
means we can't cash our checks in a saloon." 

Then their minds began to work and they began to see 
the good sense of this mild form of prohibition, and they 
took the hint. 

This hint is renewed and reiterated every pay day. The 
result is that the men who formerly cashed their pay checks 
in a saloon and drank and gambled half or all of it away 
before they reached home that night, now cash them in the 
grocery store or at the butcher shop. When they do this 
they almost always pay the grocer or the butcher what 
they owe him, before spending any of it for drink. 

Before it had seemed to be necessary every pay day to 
go immediately to the saloon to get their money. Then 
somebody would stand treat and those who drank with him 
had to return his hospitality. In this way a vicious circle 
was established. After a few rounds of drinks, home and 
duty and all other obligations were forgotten. 

But now, not only they do not have to go to the saloon 



WHISKY IS A HEALTH WRECKER 405 

for their money, but are warned not to, and they get their 
checks cashed elsewhere. 

I am told this simple device has had a great effect in 
sobering and bettering these men. 

Speaking as a business man and an employer, I know 
that the hardest problem employers of labor have to con- 
tend with is the liquor problem. There was a time when 
Kansas was not free from this curse. 

I have seen the ruinous effect of drink on my own men 
and their work. 

I have known it to make a thief out of an otherwise 
honest, capable, industrious man with a fine home and 
family. 

I have seen fine young men of great promise go down 
and out and become mere booze-soaked human wrecks. 

I have seen gifted, resourceful, useful men, men as steady 
as a clock, men no one ever had seen intoxicated, cut down 
before their time and taken to the graveyard by their habit 
of steady, but temperate drinking. 

Whisky is a health wrecker, a home wrecker and a busi- 
ness wrecker. 

Many men and women never have used liquor in any 
form. Others have been so fortunate as never to have had 
the blight of it touch any member of their family circle. 
Probably they feel that they themselves are escaping the 
consequences of this national curse. 

There can be no greater mistake than to think this. 

The greatest tax we pay in America today is the tax 
assessed on all of us by King Alcohol. It is huge, enor- 
mous. It is so vast a total that it cannot even approxi- 
mately be estimated. 

Liquor drinking, in its many forms, is the responsible 
cause for fully half the illnesses from which the people of 
the United States suffer daily. It is the cause of more than 
half of the accidents. 

That you may get a better idea of the burden and the 



406 FRIGHTFUL TOLL OF DRINK 

curse drink is to this nation, that you may know how much 
it is costing us all, day after day, let me give you some 
figures. 

The great life insurance companies have made and con- 
tinually are making a close study of national statistics of 
health and disease. To a great extent their profits depend 
on a very exact knowledge of such facts. They have dis- 
covered that in the United States there are, on an average, 
3 million persons ill all the time. Not the same 3 million 
of course, the figures simply represent the daily average 
of the ailing the country over. Simply on account of ill- 
ness 30 million wage earners lose nine days each year an- 
nually. This means a loss of 500 million dollars in wages. 

Thirty thousand men are killed every year in the indus- 
tries. Three hundred thousand are seriously injured. 

It is estimated that workers in the liquor business lose 
an average of six years of life. There are 300,000 men 
engaged in that business, some of them wise enough and 
strong enough to be abstainers themselves. But the loss 
of life due to the drink habit in just this comparatively 
small group of men amounts nearly to 2 million years in 
a single generation. 

Most of this huge loss is preventable. Nationwide pro- 
hibition would almost immediately stop half of it. Human 
life could be extended fifteen years in a single generation. 

This could be done by means of a nation-wide prohibi- 
tory law and by applying what knowledge we have of pre- 
venting disease and accidents. But if we were able only 
to extend human life one year, we should save an equivalent 
of more than 2 million lives of 45 years' duration, in the 
present generation. 

"We cannot grasp what this would mean to the people 
of this nation, but let us try. Suppose each one of these 
2 million men had an average earning capacity of $600 a 
year. The economic saving to the nation in just one year 
of their labor alone would be 1,200 million dollars! That 
is just for one year. For all the working years of these 2 



MANY MISFORTUNES DRINK CAUSES 407 

million men, between the time they were 21 and reach the 
age of 45, it would be 28,800 millions of dollars! This is 
a sum so huge, so colossal, that it is totally beyond all 
human comprehension. Yet it represents only one way 
in which nation-wide prohibition would bless us and pros- 
per us. 

If we didn't know that this nation tolerates the liquor 
business, we could never be made to believe that such an 
intelligent and civilized people would tolerate it. Our gov- 
ernment not only tolerates it, but takes pay for licensing 
the business. Virtually it is a full partner in the booze 
business and an accomplice to all of its crimes and vileness. 
Uncle Sam gets 300 million dollars of the dirtiest money 
the world ever saw as his share of the revenue every year 
from a traffic which costs him not a cent less than 5 billion 
dollars! And we have "statesmen" who wonder how we 
possibly can get along without this revenue, the bribe paid 
by the liquor interest for the privilege of debauching 103 
million people — if it can ! 

Let. me try to give you some idea of what Uncle Sam 
permits the booze business to do to him in return for this 
bribe. 

It is the cause of 75 per cent of the nation's crime, of 
60 per cent of all of its destitution. That alone is a fearful 
indictment of this national curse. 

It also is the cause of 50 per cent of all Uncle Sam's de- 
fectives, the children born simple-minded or deformed. 

It makes crazy 30 per cent of all of his insane. 

It causes every year the death of 100,000 drunkards and 
makes 100,000 new drunkards out of Uncle Sam 's boys and 
young men. 

If ruins every year 60,000 of his girls. 

It makes orphans every year of 800,000 of his children. 

It causes the murder every year of 3,000 wives. You 
read of such cases almost daily in the newspapers. 

It smothers every year 2,500 babies thru the carelessness 
of drunken, besotted parents. 



408 FRIGHTFUL TOLL OF DRINK 

It does all this and more to th'e nation every year that 
Uncle Sam may get this 300 millions of blood money which 
costs him 5 billions. 

The yearly cost to the nation in the price of the liquor 
consumed is 2 billions of dollars. The yearly cost to us as 
the result of licensing this agent of degeneracy, debauch- 
ery, poverty and crime, is 5 billions. That is the tax King 
Alcohol assesses every year on the 103 million people of 
the United States. 

We pay every cent of it and much more besides, in grief, 
in wretchedness, and in misery. For the privilege of mak- 
ing life a hell on earth in countless homes, for the right to 
undermine the very foundations of our national life and 
well-being, for a government license to wreck and ruin, 
degrade, disgrace and destroy the lives of thousands and 
tens of thousands of his children every year, the liquor 
interest pays Uncle Sam this paltry bribe and he accepts it. 

If I had to make the choice, I should rather be the ac- 
complice and share the gains of the most brutal cutthroat, 
than be a full partner — such as the national government 
is — to the unspeakable crimes of the liquor traffic, the 
vilest business, the rottenest business, the most evil busi- 
ness done on earth ov in hell. 

I have no more use for the saloon than the woman has 
who has a druaken husband. From what I have seen or 
known of its work, I believe liquor and the saloon have 
destroyed more lives, made more women and children 
widows and orphans, ruined more homes, created more 
grief, sorrow and appalling wretchedness, than a war like 
the great war in Europe liad it continued from the time 
of Christ down to the present day. 

Seeing the ravages booze made in the daily conduct of 
the business in which employer and employe were jointly 
engaged, month after month and year after year, business 
America and industrial America began going dry nearly 



SCIENCE CONDEMNS ALCOHOL 409 

twenty years ago. Today we very nearly have nation-wide 
prohibition in the big industries. 

It is known to all employers of labor that in just the 
proportion a man uses intoxicating liquor, in just that pro- 
portion is his efficiency injured and their dependability 
on him lessened. Therefore, if business men employ such 
a man at all, the boozer is the first man to be discharged 
and the last man to be taken on. And this is why prohibi- 
tion and prohibition sentiment have grown so amazingly 
from year to year, and particularly within the last year 
or so. 

Science condemns alcohol. Medicine repudiates it. Re- 
ligion disowns and renounces it. Big business debars it. 
Twenty-five states have now outlawed the traffic. More 
than 76 per cent of the area of the nation is dry by law. 
Almost half of the entire population of the United States 
now lives in dry territory and is vastly happier and better 
off for every day since it has outla^red the saloon. The 
farther away you get from the saloon, the happier and bet- 
ter your condition. Whether you are a drinker or not, you 
are vastly better off just for living in a prohibition com- 
munity, because yovir condition improves when the condi- 
tion of the community improves, just as water seeks its 
level. If you are rearing a family of children, the absence 
of the saloon is a godsend, and the older they get the more 
you appreciate the absence of the saloon. 

Here is the biggest truth in America today: No one 
thing can do half as much to increase our industrial and 
our national efficiency as putting the saloon out of busi- 
ness completely and absolutely. This only can be done by 
adopting national prohibition. It must be done and it will 
be done not later than the year 1920, and in generations 
to come men will call prohibition the greatest reform in 
the history of the world. 



PROHIBITION AS A WAR MEASURE 

From an Address at Dodge City, May 24, 1917. 

I had an interesting letter from President Wilson a few 
days ago telling me what was expected of Kansas in this 
crisis. * ' It will not be soldiers, guns, and submarines alone 
that will win this war," said the President. "It will be 
the side that can feed itself longest that will come out vic- 
torious. To supply ourselves and our allies with the food 
that will save us from famine," said President Wilson, "is 
the most gigantic task ever attempted by this or any other 
nation. ' ' 

And the important message to us as Kansans was this: 
He said to me : ' * We look to Kansas, one of the greatest 
grain-producing states of the Union, for leadership in this 
tremendous undertaking; we want Kansas to do its utmost 
in this great food drive that is to win the war." 

I replied to President Wilson that the people of Kansas 
fully appreciate this great responsibility. I told him they 
are willing and eager to do their part; that our boys and 
girls are working in garden and field as never before ; that 
the farmers of Kansas are going the limit, working longer 
hours day after day than even they had ever done, and that 
the acreage in corn, potatoes, and other foodstuffs is the 
largest the state has ever known. Kansas I assured him, 
would respond to the country 's call in a manner that would 
be a credit to the state and the nation. 

Now, then, it seemed to me that as this state is to have 
a big part in the great task of increasing the food supply 
of the nation, it would be entirely proper and indeed my 
duty for me to say to President Wilson that the people of 
Kansas who are straining every nerve to increase the food 

410 



KANSAS WILL GO THE LIMIT 411 

supply of the nation, are for their part demanding that the 
greatest national waste of all be eliminated at once, that 
he urge Congress as a war measure, to enact legislation 
prohibiting the use of food products in the manufacture 
of alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes, thus conserving 
the food supply of the country to the utmost. 

I have not only put that demand up to President Wilson 
and to Congress, but I have requested the 48 governors to 
join me in that appeal. I am sure it will be good news to 
you when I report that twenty-six governors already have 
assured me they will file in Washington a strong second 
to the motion made by Kansas. 

Which will help the more to win this war? A barrel of 
booze or a barrel of flour? Kansas will go the limit this 
year and will produce as never before. Kansas will raise 
this summer, millions of bushels for our allies in Europe, 
but we have not one bushel to waste on the abominable 
liquor traffic, the curse of mankind. 

The liquor traffic wastes 2 billion dollars of our national 
resources annually. It uses every 12 months 108 million 
bushels of grain. Twenty million bushels of corn alone are 
consumed in the manufacture of liquor, sufficient in food 
value for a million and a half men for an entire year. 
There is a great shortage of labor. Never before was there 
such need of men. The 100,000 men employed in the liquor 
industry are wanted by the nation for a better business 
than the manufacture and sale of poison for its young men. 

Why not close the breweries, distilleries, and saloons in 
war-time ? Merely to put a higher tax on liquor is prepos- 
terous, when to tolerate it is a crime against reason and 
humanity. 

Science condemns alcohol. Medicine repudiates it. Re- 
ligion disowns and renounces it. Big business debars it. 
Twenty-six states now have outlawed the traffic. More 
than 76 per cent of the area of the nation is dry by law. 

This should make it all the easier to" stop the manufac- 
ture of liquor and save 108 million bushels of grain at -a 



412 PEOHIBITION AS A WAR MEASURE 

time when thousands of human beings are starving and 
more millions are soon to face starvation. 

Almost half of the entire population of the United States 
now lives in dry territory and is vastly happier and better 
off for every day since it has outlawed the saloon. 

These blessings of prohibition were with us before the 
war, but now that we are facing the greatest war of all 
time, a war which will strain every national resource, na- 
tion-wide prohibition is an absolute national necessity and 
not to compel it, a crime against humanity and reason. 



THE CRIME OF USING GRAIN AND COAL FOR 
BOOZE-MAKING IN WAR TIME. 

From an Address at the Lamed M. E. Church, April 14, 1918. 

We now are fighting a dry Germany. There is no argu- 
ment at any time in favor of retaining the saloon. But 
there is every argument in wartime for putting it out of 
business. In Germany, the kaiser has abolished the brew- 
ery and saloon for the war. But today in America they 
are his best friends and mightiest allies, for they waste our 
food and destroy our man-power. 

Last year we made eight gallons of beer to Germany's 
one. This year our brewers will manufacture 60 million 
barrels of beer but Germany's breweries will make none. 
No beer will be made in Germany this year, but our beer 
vats will continue to waste our national strength. 

The brewers of America are greater traitors than our 
greediest profiteers. They would encourage every one of 
our million and a quarter young soldiers to become habitual 
drinkers. They would deliver the nation up to the enemy 
for the money there is in the liquor traffic. 

The government is asking the good housewives of this 
country to save food, to economize in every possible way — 



VALUABLE FOOD USED FOR BOOZE 413 

and the breweries use more of it in a day than the women 
can save in a year. Enough grain is wasted to make more 
than 4 million loaves of bread daily. 

Writing from France to the home folks in Kansas, Lieut. 
Clayton Beach says the poor French and English have 
seven wheatless, seven meatless, and about three eatless 
days a week. And while our allies are suffering for food, 
while they are appealing to us for more foodstuffs that 
they may keep more men on the firing line — while to send 
them this food means the sacrifice of fewer American lives 
— the breweries are wasting more than 60 million bushels 
of grain every twelve months. I speak for the patriotic 
farmers of Kansas when I say this state has not one bushel 
of grain to waste on the traitorous liquor traffic. To give 
it grain at any time is wicked. To give it grain now is a 
terrible crime, for it is nothing more than stabbing our 
boys in the back. 

During the zero weather in January, I saw poorly clad 
women walking along the railroad tracks in Topeka, thrust- 
ing their bare hands into the snow to find small lumps of 
coal, and at that moment great clouds of smoke were belch- 
ing from the chimneys of the breweries in Kansas City. 
The breweries are using millions of bushels of grain, 8 mil- 
lion tons of coal and 360,000 freight and refrigerator cars 
annually. Here are three vital necessities of wartime being 
used in enormous quantities by a worse than useless indus- 
try. There is no possible excuse for permitting such an 
unessential business as the liquor traffic to operate at all. 
Last winter we put the entire economic system of the nation 
out of joint by closing down industries necessary for the 
welfare of the people and the conducting of the war, and 
stopped the pay of thousands of needy wage-earners, that 
the breweries might burn their thousands of tons of coal a 
day, waste tremendous quantities of foodstuffs, and betray 
our men in the trenches. 

Kansas will have 35,000 of its finest sons in the war this 
year. In the name of Kansas, I have asked President Wil- 



414 WASTING COAL AND GRAIN 

son to give us war-time prohibition. I have asked him to 
extend to our army camps in Europe the 5-mile anti-vice 
zone which protects our men and camps at home. And I 
have asked him to ship American grain to Europe in the 
form of flour and foodstuffs so the English breweries can- 
not make beer out of that grain. And I shall keep on ask- 
ing. I understand the President's views on this question 
are changing. 

The time has come for this nation to say : ' ' Not one 
more bushel of grain which might go into breadstuffs, shall 
be converted into beer, and not another pound of coal shall 
go into its manufacture while this war lasts." 



METHODIST CHURCH THE PROPHET OF PRO- 
HIBITION. 

From an Address at Grace M. E. Church, New York City. 

You have kindly invited me, a plain, simply-spoken busi- 
ness man and editor from Kansas to tell you something 
about one of my state 's most famous products — prohibition^ 
prohibition that prohibits, prohibition that blesses and bene- . 
fits us in Kansas every day and every hour. I am deeply 
sensible of the honor you do me. And I am more than 
pleased to be able to say what I may frankly and truth- 
fully say about prohibition before a Methodist congrega- 
tion. For in Kansas Methodism and prohibition are 
synonymous. 

In Kansas the Methodist church was the prophet of pro- 
hibition, just as it now is in the United States. In Kansas, 
Methodism grappled fearlessly and mightily with the saloon 
evil in the very beginning. It drove the enemy from hun- 
dreds of towns and villages and finally clear out of the 
state. It is now engaged in driving the saloon from the 
nation. And it will succeed. 

To me, the Methodist church is typically the American 



LIQUOR INTERESTS DOMINATE NEW YORK 415 

church militant. It is ever engaged in raising the Amer- 
ican standards of law and order and citizenship. It gives 
no quarter to recognized evils. It accepts no compromise 
with vice. I can say this without prejudice, having been 
born and reared a Kansas Quaker. 

Out in Kansas we believe New York is the world's most 
wonderful city. In all the world, there is no more im- 
pressive spectacle, and few more beautiful, we think, than 
the vision of the city seen from the water front. Yet the 
building of this majestic city is not the most wonderful 
thing you have done in New York. Let me tell you for 
what thinking Kansaus honor you most : 

"We know that New York state is dominated by the liquor 
interests. 

We know you issue more than 30,000 dramshop licenses. 

We know you have no prohibition city in all this state. 

But what appears to Kansas to be your most wonderful 
achievement is that notwithstanding this almost insur- 
mountable obstacle to the popular will, you have made al- 
most half of New York state prohibition territory. 

One of our Kansas truisms is, that the saloon is the 
strongest, most convincing, most powerful argument for 
prohibition. The fact that you have more than 30,000 of 
these arguments constantly on the job in this city and 
state, makes it absolutely certain to us that New York City 
is before long to go dry. God speed the day, says Kansas. 

If a great state like New York, and a great city like New 
York City, were to seek an effective way to quickly reduce 
the cost of government, to lessen the number of murders 
and other crimes, to greatly reduce poverty, and to retire 
every saloon boss from politics, how could it best be done? 

Let me give you just a few scattering facts, gleaned from 
many sources, which suggest an answer to the question. 

Here is one : Governor Withycombe of Oregon reports 
there were nearly 50 per cent fewer commitments to the 



416 METHODISTS AND PROHIBITION 

penitentiary of that state in 1916 under prohibition, and 
that savings banks deposits increased from 35 to 45 million 
dollars. 

The Chicago Tribune kept a record for 10 years and 
found that 53,556 murders were committed by men under 
the influence of liquor. 

Archbishop Ireland declares that 80 per cent of poverty 
and 75 per cent of the social crimes are caused by drink. 

The New York State Board of Health charges that 24 
per cent of all the homicides in New. York state during 
1916 were due to drink. This does not include New York 
City. The information comes from coroners and is believed 
to be much below actual percentage. 

For the 230 million dollars in liquor revenue the national 
government has been collecting annually, the economic loss 
to the nation thru lowered production and industrial acci- 
dents is placed at 8 billion dollars. Next to the national 
government New York state collects the largest liquor rev- 
enue in this country. 

In all parts of the United States it has been proved re- 
peatedly that saloons increase taxes and return nothing to 
the community but misery, disease, poverty and crime. It 
is notorious that the saloon is our greatest public debt- 
maker. 

During the first year after Waterloo, la., went dry, ar- 
rests for drunkenness decreased 52 per cent. Arrests for 
vagrancy 54 per cent. The cost of maintaining the poor 
fell off 23 per cent. Tax sales declined 29 per cent. Build- 
ing improvements increased 46 per cent. Savings bank 
deposits increased 10 per cent. 

Coming farther east, after the saloons were driven out 
of Coatsville, Pa., one merchant had an increase of $7,000 
in his business Avithin three months. A butcher's business 
in the same town, showed a monthly increase of $500, a 
baker's a gain of $150 a week. 

Authentic reports similar to these may readily be ob- 



DRINK INCREASES VICE 417 

tained from cities and communities in any of the twenty- 
six prohibition states. 

But statistics, however illuminating, are dry. Wherever 
you find the saloon, you find the brothel. Wherever the 
saloon and the brothel exist, you find debauchery and 
crime and disease and squalor increasing. And as they in- 
crease so do prisons, reformatories, alms houses, hospitals, 
sanitariums, and insane asylums. They are needed to take 
care of the human wreckage. Where such conditions exist 
you have higher taxes, saloon-run government, graft rings 
and gunmen. Seek further and you are almost sure to 
find commercialized vice in actual partnership with the 
city government. 

Within the last five years the most shameless public 
scandals known to the history of this country have occurred 
in half a dozen American cities. Colossal vice rings have 
been discovered. Ballot box stuffing and political rotten- 
ness beyond belief has been uncovered. And in every case 
behind this iniquity, was the licensed saloon. Wherever 
the saloon exists, it must dominate. And wherever the 
saloon dominates there is blight and ruin and wickedness 
and no threshold is safe from its contamination. 



PROHIBITION'S GREATEST BATTLE YET TO 
COME. 

From an Address at Bethany College, Lindshorg, May, 1917. 

Adoption of the amendment to the federal constitution 
for national prohibition does not mean that the fight is 
won. The greatest battle for a dry nation is still to be 
fought — the battle of national enforcement of the law. 
Every prohibitionist must this year and next year demon- 
strate the faith that is in him by getting on the firing line 
of public sentiment in his locality and marshaling that 



418 PROHIBITION'S GREATEST BATTLE 

sentiment in public meetings should there be any slackness 
shown by local, state or national officials in enforcing the 
law. This is particularly clear to citizens of states that 
have enjoyed prohibition for a period of years, for they 
know how the enforcement question always became a great 
issue following the adoption of state-wide constitutional 
and statutory prohibition. 

If the prohibition movement, widespead and general as 
it is, ever needed the aggressive and vigilant support of 
the people, it will be during the next 18 months or two 
years. This period will largely determine in the mind of 
public opinion, the success or failure of national enforce- 
ment, especially in the drink-ridden cities. Unless we have 
effective enforcement there we shall be unable to demon- 
strate to these populous and skeptical localities the great 
benefits of the law, and it is here where we must create 
a public sentiment favorable to prohibition in order effec- 
tively and generally to enforce it. It is not going to be 
a walkaway. 

The nation undoubtedly is now to go thru much the 
same experience that we had in Kansas during those early 
years of prohibition but not, I think, for so long. Just 
as Kansas' experience has been valuable to the states that 
later adopted state-wide constitutional prohibition, so the 
nation is to profit from the experience of Kansas. It has 
been the fate of Kansas to be the storm center of prohibi- 
tion as it was in its territorial days the storm center of the 
fight that ended in the extinction of human slavery. In 
pioneering in both these great causes she became the target 
for the shafts of irony and abuse of the interests that suf- 
fered from the triumph of these great causes. 

For many years it has been fashionable for the liquor 
interests to point the finger of scorn and obloquy at Kansas 
but thru it all Kansas never lowered her lance and now 
she finds herself justified by the adoption as a national 
policy of the principle to which she has so long adhered 
as a state policy. In the rocky road her people have 



THE PRICE KANSAS PAID 419 

traveled to this triumph, however, Kansas has had to listen 
to the most absurd and unfounded of cliarges made by the 
liquor interests. It was vehemently charged . and widely 
published that insanity had suddenly increased in the state ; 
that the poorhouses were filled to overflowing; that busi- 
ness depression was broadcast; that taxes had increased; 
that crime had grown beyond the crime in any of the liquor 
states having twice the population, Kansas people had to 
refute the baseless charges that savings deposits had fallen 
off alarmingly, that women and children were crying in 
the streets for food, that divorces had increased beyond the 
record at Reno, that the state was going down to commer- 
cial and domestic decay because the saloons had been closed 
and the brewers were not permitted to brew more trouble. 
This form of libel was the price Kansas had to pay for 
decency. Thru it all Kansas had to keep the traditional 
stiff upper lip in the knowledge that right would prevail 
and the forces of evil would perish. But at the end of 
a period of more than thirty-five years prohibition has 
proved itself and the much maligned state of Kansas finds 
itself the honored pioneer in the nation-wide fight to secure 
similar blessings to the people of the whole nation. 



EDUCATIONAL AND INSPIRATIONAL 
TALKS 

Arthur Capper always has shown great interest in young 
people. His concern has been not merely for the tots who 
attend his annual birthday parties or picnics, but for the 
youths and maidens of high school age and on up to the 
young men and young women emerging from college and 
other youthful activities into the serious responsibilities of 
adult life. Selections in the following pages are from this 
type of addresses. 



OPPORTUNITIES IN KANSAS FOR YOUNG MEN 
AND WOMEN. 

From an Address at Caldwell, Kan., High School, May 16, 

1917. 

I have talked a great deal to young men and women and 
boys and girls just finishing high school about the oppor- 
tunities there are for them in Kansas. And I believe I am 
right when I say that in no place in the world will they 
find a field for greater usefulness, or a better chance to 
make something out of their lives than right here in their 
native state. I know the lure of the big city, I know how 
the white lights beckon, and how the stories of country 
boys who have left the farm and have grown rich and 
powerful in the city, appeal to the youthful imagination. 
The stories are true enough, too. Why, if you'd take the 

421 



422 BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES IN KANSAS 

country-bred men and women out of Chicago and New 
York, you'd have very few of the real leaders left. The 
big preachers, the leading lawyers, the principal business 
men and bankers, the doctors, the manufacturers — put 
them all together and you'd be surprised to find how large 
a percentage of them began their education in the little 
country school house. 

Yes, the country boy often rises to high rank in the city. 
The city must draw new blood from the country or it loses 
its vigor. But that isn't the whole story. For every coun- 
try boy who goes to the city and makes a name for himself, 
ninety-nine make an utter failure. They are unused to city 
ways. They don't know the cold and heartless game of 
life as played in the city. There are so many blind-alley 
jobs that lead nowhere. So many hand-to-mouth jobs that 
get young fellows in ruts and sap their ambition and take 
all their "pep." In the city you must compete with thou- 
sands instead of hundreds, or less than hundreds. The 
competition is so fierce, the struggle is so great that only 
the exceptional man and woman, here and there, ever can 
hope to succeed. And to fail in the city is so much more 
hopeless than to fail in the country. You can win in the 
country. You are not down and out. You can try and try 
again, and you always get more out of life. 

A man doesn't have to be a great and shining light to 
get along in the country. If he behaves himself and does 
the best he can he keeps the respect of his neighbors and 
has his place in the community. He doesn't have to be a 
Napoleon of finance, nor a coal baron, nor a merchant 
prince, in order to be somebody and amount to something. 
If he has bad luck, or goes broke, or meets with disaster 
of any kind, there are always plenty of friends and neigh- 
bors to hold out a helping hand. But in the city, if he 
fails to land on his feet, right-side-up-with-care, it 's " good- 
bye, John" for him. 

It is not that the people of our big cities are naturally 
more brutal or more heartless than country people. Not 



HOW THEY PLAY THE GAME 423 

at all. But they "play the game," as we say, in a different 
way and they scarcely take a moment 's time to do anything 
else. Here in Caldwell you have enough sympathy and 
consideration and brotherly love to go round. But how 
would it be if you had a million people, or 2 million people 
crowded into this country, many of them suffering for 
want of the common necessities of life? "What would you 
do then? 

"Why I'm afraid most of us would do exactly as the ma- 
jority of people do in the cities — become callous and hard- 
ened and indifferent, "We would content ourselves with 
giving a few dollars occasionally to some charitable insti- 
tution or organization, then get busy with our own affairs 
and forget everything else. There is so much grief and 
suffering in cities, and all the time, that it is an old, old 
story. You "get used to it." You expect it. 

God help the man or woman who loses out in the struggle 
for existence in a great city ! I have seen the bread line 
on a cold winter's night in New York; I have seen the 
shivering mass of humanity around the 10-cent lodging 
houses in South Clark Street, Chicago; I have seen strong, 
stalwart men trying to support a family on a mere pittance 
in a city where absolutely every necessity of life with the 
exception of the air they breathed cost two prices, and 
even the air was polluted and foul ; I have seen young girls 
from the country lose their bloom of health and often the 
more precious bloom of innocence in a struggle to earn a 
tiny wage in a store or shop, and as I have seen them, I 
have cried out to myself: 

""Why, oh why, do you come here? The great plains of 
the West have a place for you. There is room and to spare ; 
there is work to do. And more than that, there are neigh- 
bors who grow to be friends. There are kind hearts and 
sympathy. There is a chance to grow into something 
worth while!" 

In our modern scheme of things, great cities seem to be 
a very necessary evil. And it is necessary that somebody 



424 BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES IN KANSAS 

lives in them. Somebody must sell ribbons, somebody must 
shovel coal, somebody must print the newspapers, some- 
body must clean the streets and somebody must do the 
city's dirty work. But why must that somebody be you? 
You who have the opportunity of living a free and happy 
life, you have the chance to do w^ell, to live well and to 
some purpose on a Kansas farm. Unless you are very, 
very sure that you have exceptional talents in some certain 
direction ; unless you are sure that you are a great genius 
and that you can't help it, you cannot do more for the 
world or more for yourself than to stay right here and 
help develop this good state into the greatness that surely 
awaits it. 

And after all, my young friends, we are very apt to get 
a greatly distorted idea about what constitutes greatness; 
and about what makes life worth while. If you go to buy 
a horse, you don't judge his value by the sort of work he 
happens to be doing. He may be hitched to a dirty street 
cleaning cart, or going up a back alley, or he may be 
decked out in flashy harness and drawing the golden 
chariot in a circus parade with a $10,000 beauty weighing 
250 pounds holding the lines — but what you want to know 
about him is whether he's sound in wind and limb and 
what sort of a disposition he has. You don't value him 
for the kind of work you find him doing, but for doing 
that W'ork well. 

And I have an idea that the Great Overseer of the Uni- 
verse doesn't judge men by the importance the world at- 
taches to the job they happen to hold down in this life. 
Some of us get into the circus parade and thousands look 
on and applaud ; some of us pull a load twice as lieavy and 
ten times more worth while up a back street where no one 
sees us; but our real worth to ourselves and to the world 
depends upon our ability to do the job in front of us. 
That's what counts. So many of us "kill our engine" 



THE FOUNDATION OF RICHES 425 

every time we get in a tight place — and then the driver 
has to get out and crank us up all over again. 

I said something awhile ago about getting rich on a Kan- 
sas farm. I don't mean making a million dollars. I don't 
mean getting so much money that you have to struggle like 
poor old Andy Carnegie to find some way to get rid of it. 
I don't mean growing to be like John D. Rockefeller, who 
pays so much income tax that he's ashamed to tell how 
much it is. Or maybe he really pays so little he's ashamed 
of it. Anyway he won't tell. No, I don't mean getting 
to be a bloated bondholder or anything like that. The 
cities produce enough of them. Kansas needn't go into 
that business. What I mean by growing rich in Kansas 
is getting a competency; owning a good farm well-stocked 
and well-tilled; a farm which when rightly farmed grows 
more valuable every year of your life. But that's only the 
foundation, that is only the beginning of your riches in 
Kansas. You grow rich in friends, friends who will stand 
by you thru thick and thin, friends who are worth more 
to you than all the money in the world. 

If you will pardon a personal reference, I wish to say 
here that Kansas has been mighty good to me for fifty-one 
years. The people of Kansas have helped me build up one 
of the big business concerns of the state. They have in- 
vested a lot of money in the printing and publishing plant 
I call mine in Topeka. They have seen fit to make me 
their chief executive twice, but it is all as nothing when 
compared with the genuine friendship that so many Kan- 
sas men and women and boys and girls have given me. 
You may take all the rest if you will leave me my friends. 
I don't know, maybe I'm a little prejudiced, but it seems 
to me friends are a little truer and friendships a little 
warmer in Kansas than in any other spot on earth. I 
haven't been in all of them, of course, and so I can't be 
sure; but that's the way it seems to me. 

And while your farm is growing richer and your friends 
are coming closer, you are also growing richer in opportuni- 



426 BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES IN KANSAS 

ties. You know, in reality a man doesn't have to join the 
army or go to the battlefields of Europe in order to be a 
hero. Sometimes he's a bigger hero if he stays at home 
and pays the grocer and keeps his children in school. And 
a man doesn't have to go to the slums of the great cities 
in order to find an opportunity to help the poor. Maybe 
the man working on the next farm needs help and consola- 
tion, encouragement and sympathy. An ambitious young 
woman need not go to New York City to do settlement 
work. She can settle down at home and help her mother 
and employ her spare time if she has any left, in making 
her home community happier and better. A man need not 
necessarily go to Washington to become a statesman or a 
patriot. He can pay his taxes and perform all the duties 
of citizenship in his own township. 

Kansas is full of opportunities for the employment of 
all the surplus energy of every citizen. We are proud of 
the progress we have made as a state in a little more than 
half a century; but there are many things we need — Oh, 
so many. No Kansas man or woman need go gadding about 
the world looking for opportunities to do good — looking for 
work that is worth while. We have plenty to do at home. 

Kansas is a prosperous state as prosperity goes, but we 
are only beginning to come into our own. The population 
of this nation is growing by leaps and bounds. In the next 
thirty years, by the time the young people within the sound 
of my voice have reached the prime of life, the population 
of the United States, at the present rate of increase, will 
be more than 175 million people. These people must be 
fed, and Kansas will be called upon to provide her full 
share of the bread and butter and beef and pork that they 
will need. That means a greater market for the products 
of every acre on every Kansas farm. That calls for better 
farming methods; for greater yields an acre; and most of 
all for more brains in farming. Agriculture has become 
a science with unlimited possibilities. It requires more 
brains today to run a farm successfully than was needed 



KANSAS FARMS GOOD INVESTMENTS 427 

for the biggest mercantile business a half century ago ; and 
the world stands ready, now as always, to pay for brains.' 
Kansas farms are big with opportunity — and if we keep 
our wits about us and don't let the market speculators get 
all the profit, the opportunity will grow bigger every year. 
I have given you reasons why I think it is better to stay 
in Kansas. In closing I should like to hammer into your 
consciousness just this one fact, for it is absolutely true : 
The people of Kansas are better off, they have the best 
prospects, and I think they are to have the greatest future, 
of any people now on earth. There is no other place to 
go — or to stay in — unless it is Heaven. I advise you to 
stay in Kansas until you are ready to go there. 



PRACTICAL EDUCATION THE NEED OF THE DAY. 

From a Commemoration Day Address at the Pittsburg 

Normal and Manual Training Scliool, Pittshurg, 

Kan., March 31, 1916. 

I am glad to be with you on this great day. I have come 
most willingly because I am as interested in this institution 
and as proud of what you are doing here as you are. But 
I wish to talk with you rather than to make a speech. 

It is as a busy man, as a working man, that I have come 
here to help celebrate Commemoration Day and I am con- 
vinced that nobody ever had better cause to celebrate, or 
to commemorate the founding of this great school than you 
have. 

We have all heard time and again that "a thing of 
beauty is a joy forever." I should like to change that a' 
little and say it this way, that a piece of work well done, 
be it great or small, is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. 
Therein is the true happiness of work and the true work- 



428 PEACTICAL EDUCATION OUR NEED 

man cannot be happy without that satisfaction and happi- 
ness, no matter what his wages may be. 

Commemoration Day has some such meaning for this 
great school, I take it, and for every person connected with 
it. You have rounded out another year. Sighting back 
to the principles on which this school was founded, running 
a line from the beginning, you measure the truth of its 
work this year and note the progress of the school. But, 
you, yourselves, are the school. 

We do well to cultivate this workman-like pride and 
workman-like pleasure over work well done, over duty 
faithfully performed. It is thru this joy of work that we 
gather more courage and more determination to go on; 
that we feel the glow of that fine thing called inspiration 
which leads us to attempt and to master more and more 
difficult work. And to do this is one of the greatest, one 
of the wholesomest, one of the most substantial and one of 
the most satisfying joys of life. In Genesis, you remember 
that it says when God created the heavens and the earth. 
He saw they were good. And on the seventh day He rested. 
God gives all of us this joy in all our well-doing. This 
satisfaction is our higher reward. It is the wages of the 
Master. 

When I learned from Dr. Brandenburg that in twelve 
short years, and from a most modest beginning, the enroll- 
ment of this school had increased from 143 students in 
1903 to 2,450 in 1916, that every week its extension work 
was reaching teachers in 24 Kansas towns and cities, that 
the manifold cultural influences of this great training 
school of mind and hand were becoming more and more 
widespread, I comprehended more fully the tremendous 
significance of its work for the greater and the nobler Kan- 
sas of the future, the bright sunrise of which we already 
are glimpsing on the horizon. For everywhere tliruout 
Kansas the people are feeling a great quickening, but no- 
where are we building more substantially and more ideally 
for that future than here at Pittsburg. And you, my for- 



A VISION FOR YOUNG KANSANS 429 

ward-looking young friends, who, scarcely conscious of it, 
perhaps, have felt this quickening spirit and been drawn 
here; you who have made many sacrifices to come here, 
you are to play a greater part and do more for your state 
and for the home communities and for yourselves in the 
years to come, I am convinced, than any like number of 
young Kansans it has ever been my good fortune to see. 
The work in which you are engaged is all so far-reaching, 
it is to be so potent, so powerful, so truly patriotic and so 
permeating an influence, that now we can only partly com- 
prehend it. It seems rather more a glorious vision than a 
reality. Yet you, and we, are going to realize this vision, 
for I am satisfied we much underrate rather than overrate 
these great probabilities. I ask you to accept this as the 
opinion of a practical business man. 

It is something like this that I feel this Commemoration 
Day marks, that it will stand as one of the great milestones 
of Kansas progress. 

This great state-building institution justifies your pride 
in it and the pride of Kansas in it. It is doing an urgently 
needed service for the state and for you, and it is doing it 
remarkably well. You Kansas young people who are its 
students, are fortunate in having such a place to come for 
that training which is to make you skillful, efficient, and 
resourceful men and women and high-grade citizens, use- 
ful to your home community and to the state and able to 
look life in the face, frankly, independently and unafraid, 
because you are being fitted to meet it on every practical 
ground, to offer it something vital which the world has 
always needed, has heretofore so seldom received, and al- 
ways will welcome wherever you may go; for there are so 
many ways in which your training will prove useful, it 
will open so many avenues and so many opportunities to 
you, that you will somewhere among them all find your 
especial niche and earn the Master's wages of happiness 
and well-being while you are earning your daily bread in 
giving to the world what it rightfully demands of you and 



430 PRACTICAL EDUCATION OUR NEED 

all of us. But best of all, I hope, you will prove to the 
world that here in Kansas we are producing a higher, a 
newer and a finer and nobler type of citizenship than any 
the world has yet seen. I think we are well on the way to 
just that. And that it will be such schools as this one and 
such training as you will get here and take in turn to other 
potential citizens, either by the influence of your personal 
example or as teachers, that will bring this about — and 
first of all right here in Kansas — where we still hold to 
old-fashioned virtues, where life is so much simpler and 
natural, where the moral atmosphere is so much cleaner, 
vital, bracing and vigorous, and where physical and spirit- 
ual health abound. In these conditions and with these 
advantages we are as Kansans most divinely blessed and 
for that very reason more is to be demanded of us. You, 
my young friends, are to be in the very vanguard of this 
great movement. Strive with all your might when you 
leave this place to prove worthy of your great mission, do 
not betray it. Be manly men, womanly women, upright, 
honorable, fair, kind, generous, patient, clear-minded and 
clean-minded, strong-hearted and industrious, and you will 
bless yourselves as well as others. That is the successful 
life. There is no other so truly successful. 

The old idea of what constitutes an education is under- 
going a great change. Not so many centuries ago educa- 
tion, except for the priesthood, was for the favored few, 
for the nobility ; for those who had no need to labor because 
they were supported in elegant idleness by others just as 
good as they were, but who were not born to position and 
wealth and titled rank. As they were not compelled to be 
self-supporting or to make their way in the world by their 
own exertions, this favored few was given an education 
not of brain and hand but of mind and manners and graces 
suited to their station. It was an education much more 
ornamental than really useful and practical. It was for 
dreamers, for those aloof from life's deeper interests, for 
those who were looking in a desultory way for some higher 



BETTER BUSINESS PREPARATION NEEDED 431 

amusement and occupation than that of gaming and hunt- 
ing, or of brawling and fighting, or of the mere pursuit 
of pleasure. 

As the world in its slow progress toward democracy and 
equality moved forward toward modern times, this educa- 
tion in the elegancies of life, by gradual steps gave place 
to the classical education for the learned professions. Edu- 
cation still was intended only for persons of means and 
abundant leisure. Not until America and the birth of a 
new democracy in the new world provided public schools 
for everyone, and not much before the present time, have 
we had a system of education combining the modern ele- 
ment of training for mind and hand, a training for those 
whom the world needs and is calling for more and more 
insistently as human life and human wants become more 
complex and a thousand skilled industries and occupations 
have sprung up where one existed before. Even now, in 
well-to-do and enlightened Kansas, more than 85 per cent 
of our future citizens are going forth to their life work 
without preparation for the treadmill of daily life. And 
to them, I fear, it will be a treadmill indeed. 

Today everywhere the demand is for the skilled man and 
the skilled woman, for men and women who have been 
taught to do something useful superbly well and who take 
a personal pride and interest in their work. And this de- 
mand is going to grow and grow, and is growing, so rapidly 
that Jack and the beanstalk are not to be compared with 
it. The world— that part of it with which we touch elbows 
as well as the remainder — now demands to have its work 
well done. It insists on thoroness, a good first-class job 
with the shine of quality on it, put there lovingly by the 
hands of the workman who loves his job. The slipshod 
workman, the careless workman, the hit-or-miss w^orkman, 
and the happy-go-lucky fellow, and the untrained, un- 
skilled man or woman — whether the worker is occupied 
with the management of a home or is attempting to provide 
the living for one — well, they had better been born rich. 



432 PRACTICAL EDUCATION OUR NEED 

We must bring the school and the home, the school and 
the shop, the school and the farm, the school and the 
church, closer and closer together. 

Wherever we are, whatever we do, we always shall find 
that knowing how is the greatest thing in the world. It's 
not alone in the dollars that it puts in the pocketbook or 
the bank, in the bonds that it stacks up for us in the vault 
that counts — it's in the splendid, superb, magnificent, deep- 
down satisfaction that it gives us when we do a thing and 
do it right. That's why "know-how" is the greatest thing 
— and why it pays best. 

Modern education should, and I think will, educate mind 
and heart and soul and body, but it must educate head and 
hand. To come out of school with a smattering of accom- 
plishments and a dislike or a disdain of work, or of labor, 
is almost worse than never to have entered school at all. 

To do one's daily work efficiently, to earn a bit more 
than one spends, to tell the truth always and to all men, 
especially to your employer, to be gentle and just to one's 
neighbors, to be a light maker for those who can make no 
light of their own — to do these things seven days in the 
week, 52 weeks in the year — will earn you the right, I 
believe, to call yourself a good neighbor, a good citizen and 
a good Kansan. 

In my opinion one great evidence that education and 
home-training is not a failure in Kansas, is that in Kansas 
patriotism — true patriotism — is a household virtue. Our 
Kansas boys and girls are Americans, every inch of them. 
And I believe it will not be difficult to inspire in them as 
men and women, the desire to make an intensely practical 
and effective use of this patriotic feeling; to turn their 
patriotism and their training into patriotic action, and so, 
live it. 

What a great thing this would be for Kansas and the 
nation. 

It is a great satisfaction to me to know there are so many 
young men and young women of this kind in this big audi- 



MANUAL TRAINING IS VALUABLE 433 

ence. No young people, I am sure, have finer prospects. 
Let me urge you to be missionaries of this new gospel of 
education — and first of all — here at home, in your native 
state. Kansas needs you. Kansas will appreciate you. 
And I believe, taking every condition into consideration, 
life in Kansas has most to offer you. Don't go away from 
Kansas. With all its fine resources, all its almost limitless 
possibilities, it needs every trained man and woman it has 
produced. It would be a poor testimony of gratitude to 
desert the state that made you. No country in the world, 
no other state, holds better chances for the man willing to 
do his part in life, not alone for material success — for that 
would be a poor conception of life's duties — but also for 
the ennobling opportunities to be found in public service. 

The philosopher, the poet, the dreamer, all have their 
place in the world. They are the inspiration of the men 
of action; they keep us in touch with the eternal verities. 
But now the world's work is done by men and women of 
skilled hands — men and women schooled and trained in 
doing — by men who can make two blades of grass grow 
where one grew before ; by women who can sweep a room, 
teach, or manage a home with equal skill. I trust I am not 
lacking in appreciation of higher education — indeed, I am 
sure I am not; but I know that the youth of Kansas, the 
boys and girls who in a few short years are to till our 
fertile fields and carry on the daily business of our com- 
mon life, must first of all be skilled of hand and quick of 
eye and trained in the common things that make civiliza- 
tion possible and life wholesome and worthy. 

And so — perhaps because my early education was for 
the most part acquired thru my fingers at the printer's 
case — I am especially interested in the work which this 
school in Pittsburg is doing in manual training. I consider 
it one of the most important factors in our educational 
system. From the utilitarian point of view, I believe it is 
the function of our public school to train our youth for 
their life work — to develop in them the ability to earn a 



434 PRACTICAL EDUCATION OUR NEED 

livelihood. From tlie cultural viewpoint, I am sure that 
the boy and girl who have been taught to do things, whose 
hands and eyes are trained, develop mentally and morally 
and spiritually, more rapidly and more fully than do the 
youths who lack this training. I rejoice that the idea for 
which this school stands has been so extensively incor- 
Dorated into our common school system, and I hope to see 
its extension. I believe we have only started this work, 
and we shall need more trained men and women to carry 
it on. It is to this institution that we must look for these 
leaders and teachers, and Kansas must see to it that our 
manual training school in teaching staff and in equipment 
shall not be out-ranked elsewhere. We must go forward 
as rapidly as our means will allow. 

Above all should we strive to maintain that spirit of 
simplicity, industry, democracy and fellowship so befitting 
the patriotic Americanism that is and ought to be the 
atmosphere of this school and this state ; that broad sym- 
pathy with human endeavor, in shop, field, street and 
office ; that love of home and state and country so deeply 
ingrained in the heart of every true son and daughter of 
Kansas and which sooner or later inspires every one of us 
to do his or her best to contribute, in every possible way 
a devotedly loyal, home-loving citizen can contribute, to 
the upbuilding of his community and the progress of his 
native state, those sterling qualities of citizenship expressed 
in ungrudging civic service ; the spirit of human brother- 
hood which holds all mankind in friendship and leads us 
to strive patiently with the erring and to give happily a 
helping hand to an overburdened neighbor; that respect 
and chivalry for womanhood and old age which prompts 
us intuitively to forget ourselves in their service, a chivalry 
like that of Lincoln's as far surpassing the merely social 
graces as the natural nobility which springs from a noble 
heart surpasses the shallow and artificial assumption of 
this inward grace. For wliile this school is teaching clean 
and clear young minds and willing hands to shape, fashion 



GOOD SCHOOLS AEE ESSENTIAL 435 

and transmute nature 's gifts into a more potent usefulness, 
it also is shaping, fashioning, dedicating and glorifying 
the lives of you who represent the best type of our pur- 
poseful, forward-looking ambitious young people, to be the 
missionaries here at home, in your own state, of the new 
day that is dawning in America which shall lift state and 
nation and then the w^orld to higher, better, happier things 
thru thrift, service, simplicity, harmony and co-operation, 
to that fuller, richer productive life that the genius and 
skill of man warrants as the promise of this new and com- 
ing age. 

So I ask for practical, up-to-date, present-day schools 
like this Pittsburg State Manual Normal Training School 
— schools that wall be of direct practical service and that 
will widen the opportunities of every boy and girl in 
Kansas. 

Ours is the duty and these are the times when Kansas 
men and women must line up more unanimously than ever 
Kansas has lined up before, behind every man, behind 
every movement, behind every public measure that is right, 
that is just, that is for the betterment of mankind, for the 
advancement of human progress and public service, irre- 
spective and regardless of any and all other considerations 
and consequences whatsoever. 

Let us earnestly resolve that every day we live we shall 
endeavor with all the earnestness we possess to make Kan- 
sas greater, cleaner, happier, better, that we may ever de- 
serve true happiness and genuine prosperity, as well as 
merit the honor and esteem of generations here and yet 
to come, and crown our lives with the wondrous satisfac- 
tion that comes of doing God's work. 



IMPORTANCE OF GETTING STARTED RIGHT. 

From an Address to County High School Students at Em- 
poria, Kan. 

Your principal has asked me to tell you something about 
my own boyhood and school days. 

This will give me a somewhat better opportunity of 
proving to you how useful is training in self-reliance to a 
boy. I don't mind telling you that a good many years ago 
I was just an average Kansas urchin with no signs of 
wings where angels are supposed to grow them, but no boy 
ever had a better father and mother. They were good 
Quaker parents, members of the Quaker church. "William 
Penn, you remember, was a Quaker. In the early days of 
American history many of the colonists were Quakers. I 
now know how lucky I was to have such a father and 
mother. You will someday realize, yourselves, if you are 
not already realizing it, how devoted your parents are to 
you, how concerned about your future interests, and how 
much better fitted to guide you and to advise you than 
you are yourself. 

At times I thought my parents were pretty strict with 
me. In this they would be called old-fashioned parents 
nowadays, but long ago I began to find out how wise and 
how sensible they were in being strict, for it was from this 
very training and discipline that all my life I have most 
benefited. This practical home training proved a rich 
legacy to me and for many years I have been zealously 
preaching to my young friends the gospel of work, of self- 
reliance, of sobriety and economy. I believe in helping 
our boys and girls to help themselves. 

I had a mother that any boy must have loved and re- 

436 



TAUGHT BY PRECEPT AND EXAMPLE 437 

spected. As I look back I can see how patiently and how 
kindly she labored to make me the right sort of man, the 
man she wanted me to be. This, I think, is every mother's 
mission. It was my mother's ambition. Slie wanted her 
boy, always, to be fair and square, dependable and honor- 
able. She wanted him to have good habits. 

Both my father and my mother taught me to be indus- 
trious and they did it by precept and by example. My 
father believed that every boy should earn his own spend- 
ing money. We lived in a little town in a house that had 
a very large yard. In the summers we went to the coun- 
try. I began as a small boy to work in what, nowadays in 
Kansas, would be considered a large garden, and father 
paid me what I earned, just as he would have paid any- 
one else. In this way he taught me how to save and how 
to spend money in the way that would be of most benefit 
to me. 

I worked during every vacation and every Saturday 
while going to school. In the meantime I was learning the 
printer's trade in the country printing office w^here our 
weekly newspaper was printed. Our country high schools 
in those days, thirty-two years ago, were by no means as 
good as yours are, or as such high schools as we now have 
in Kansas. They taught about as much as may now be 
learned in the eighth grade. Thanks to my mother's in- 
spiration and to the watchful encouragement of my teach- 
ers, I was able to lead my class of ten in this school and 
was chosen its valedictorian. We had the graduation exer- 
cises on Friday and the next Monday, at the age of 18, I 
had left home and started out looking for a job. I found 
work at my trade in Topeka on the Daily Capital, after- 
wards becoming its owner. 

Notwithstanding that I .have succeeded as a publisher 
and a business man, I have always felt the need and have 
always regretted that I had no college training. There 
was not then the opportunity in Kansas there now is for 
a boy or girl to get such an education, nor was it then as 



438 IMPORTANCE OF GETTING STARTED RIGHT 

necessary as it is now to have such an education. Now- 
adays any boy or girl with a little push and determination 
and the right sort of stuff in them can work their way 
thru college in Kansas. At Lawrence, at Manhattan, at 
Baldwin, at Topeka, at Emporia, at Hays and at Pittsburg 
and other educational centers in Kansas, I learn that at 
least half the Kansas boys and girls now are working their 
way thru college. It is just such students as these who do 
the best work, who make the best use of their time and 
their opportunities and who put what they learn to the 
best use. They benefit themselves and their home com- 
munities and the state by the use they make of their knowl- 
edge, and they become successful men and women and use- 
ful citizens. Our best and most successful men and women 
in Kansas are now coming up in this way and I urge you 
to follow in their footsteps. 

That parents can be too strict as well as too lax, I be- 
lieve we all know from observation if not from experience. 
Many parents fail to realize that as boys and girls grow 
older they are to be treated less like children and more like 
men and women and companions and equals, which is the 
final and ideal relationship. 

In a newspaper the other day I read of a young woman 
20 years old who ran away from a home of wealth and 
went to work as a house girl for a family in a neighboring 
city. It was all a great mystery until it came out that this 
young woman never had been allowed to have any young 
men callers; never had been permitted to go to any enter- 
tainment except with one or both of her parents ; that even 
when she left home in the afternoon she was required to 
call her mother on the telephone and report what she was 
doing and when she was coming home. At 20 years some 
of these precautions at least were unnecessary. Was it any 
wonder this young woman in final revolt at such nagging 
interference with her every action and with the innocent 
emotions and sentiments experienced by every healthy, 
wholesome girl, should run away from home? Yet — so 



SEE EVERYTHING BUT OVERLOOK MUCH 439 

read the newspaper account — who were so amazed and 

dumfounded as these same misguided, overstrict parents 

.who were treating a grown woman as if she were a child? 

Last year 1,439 girls and young women disappeared from 
homes in New York City alone ; 50,000, I am told, are lost 
in the United States every year. The head of the police 
department in New York City, whose duty it is to trace 
missing girls and investigate these cases in greater New 
York, says the chief cause of these disappearances is lack 
of freedom or severity on the part of parents. 

These same problems also come up in dealing with boys. 
A great and successful teacher of boys once said to me, 
''See everything but overlook much." In other words he 
argued for the necessity of watchfulness, without the ap- 
pearance of perpetual guardianship and nagging and un- 
due interference. Unfortunately there is no school for 
parents other than their own childhood and sometimes par- 
ents forget they ever were young. It is a great responsi- 
bility, this rearing of boys and girls by parents and this 
rearing of parents by boys and girls. But in Kansas I 
hope to see them work together on terms of mutual respect, 
affection, obedience and companionship, the ideal home 
relationship and the best promoter of good citizenship. 



HOME MAKING OUR MOST IMPORTANT BUSINESS. 

From an Address to High School Students at Waterville 
High School, May 19, 1916. 

The world's greatest business, the world's most vital 
business is the business of home-making. A state or a na- 
tion is no stronger than its homes. No home is better than 
its homemaker. The health and w^ell-being, the fate and 
the future of the members of every family are largely in 
the hands of the homemaker or the home manager. Yet 



440 HOME MAKING IS IMPORTANT 

some of us have heard young women boast that they do not 
know a thing about housekeeping, that they couldn't boil 
water without scorching it. And notwithstanding the best , 
wish, the dearest wish, that men and women who have seen 
and know life wish for every girl, is that some day she 
shall have a home of her own and that it shall be a happy 
and a successful home. These terms are almost synony- 
mous. 

But how much can a girl who cannot boil water without 
burning it, who never sewed a stitch in her life, who hasn't 
the practical knowledge of how to cook a meal — how much 
can such a girl contribute toward making a home success- 
ful? Wouldn't she be about as much of a hindrance to a 
successful home as a good big mortgage on the house, in 
fact, a dead-weight and a drag? Cannot many domestic 
failures, many broken homes, much ill health in families, 
much hardship and poverty, many separations, and much 
marital unhappiness be traced to such lack of domestic 
training in thrift? How are young people to manage in 
these days of high prices which tax the managerial ability 
of experienced housekeepers, if they don't know these 
things ? 

I think we will all agree it never was more important 
than it is today that every girl, whatever her station or 
condition in life, should be taught how to cook properly 
and manage a house intelligently and in conformity with 
established scientific rules and principles. No woman's 
education should be considered complete until she knows 
how to manage a home successfully. It is vastly more im- 
portant, it seems to me, than any knowledge of the dead 
languages. Six of our great American colleges for women, 
I am told, demand four years of Latin, but none of the 
girls at any of these leading schools for girls is required 
to know, or is taught how, to cook, how to make her own 
clothing, or any of the things a girl should know if she is 
to become a successful homemaker and this we never should 
forget is the world's most important business. 



AN AGE FOR THE YOUNG MAN AND WOMAN. 

From a Commencement Day Address at the Cherokee, 
Kan., High School, May 5, 1915. 

You young men and women of 1915 have the brightest 
future, I believe, that ever has been presented to graduates 
of this or any other country. The world is so filled with 
important things to do, these busy days, that no man needs 
any help except his own brains and persistency to be some- 
body or get somewhere, wherever he may be. It is a time 
of almost unlimited possibilities for the willing and the 
efficient man or woman. 

But it is not a weakling's job. Strong men are needed 
and strong women — men and women with courage to dis- 
card precedents, to strike out Avith confidence, with ability 
to do things better than they ever were done before. We 
need more men who do not fear to break new ground, to 
blaze new trails, to lead the people on to a larger and more 
satisfactory progress. 

We are living in a time of push, power, prod ! Five 
million women are engaged in gainful occupations in this 
one nation ! And the number is increasing. 

Let me assure this fine class of 1915 that the West needs 
its young men and its women as never before. Progressive 
employers in Kansas and all over this growing western 
country are looking for wideawake men, men who can do 
things right and do them quicker than any other man. 
New and better ideals in government by and for the people 
in fact present marvelous chances for honesty and honor 
and progress. In no age have energy, ambition, knowledge, 

441 



442 AN AGE FOR THE YOUNG 

efficiency, been more in the public mind, or more greatly 
in demand. 

And don't forget your morals when you start for your- 
self. This is not a platitude. The world's demand for 
clean living and good habits is proved in the refusal of 
employers, corporations, managers of athletic organizations 
even to consider the applications of men with double stand- 
ards of morals. Leaving out the, right or the wrong of it, 
employers know that the drinker, or the man who stays up 
late, or dissipates, cannot be depended upon. Therefore 
they make it their business to know what their employes 
are doing after supper as well as during the day. 

In towns and cities more and more employes are realizing 
they must choose between the drink and the job. Wliile 
they may exercise their personal liberty by indulging in 
intoxicants, the employer may also exercise his personal 
liberty by putting other men at work who live clean, decent 
lives, whose efficiency has not been diminished by liquor. 
Dissipation is a detriment, bad habits a heavy handicap 
everywhere. Persisted in, they mean certain failure. 

Individuals, firms and corporations who until recently 
have been neutral and indifferent on the liquor question 
are now taking radical action to protect their employes 
from the baneful effects of the saloon and are giving their 
men to understand that if they persist in patronizing such 
places their positions will be given to others. There is no 
sentiment about this on the part of employers, they treat 
it as a cold matter of business. 

All of wliich I tell you young men and women who are 
leaving port because you must know something of the sea 
you are to sail, and because such incontrovertible facts 
from a business man should have weight with those who 
might not so readily respect the message of a professional 
lecturer. We have come to put a fine value on reputation. 
Reputation of the right sort comes only from the right 
character — what you are in fact, not what you think you 
are, or what you try to make the world believe you are. 



YOUNG PEOPLE MUST MAKE GOOD 443 

We can't fool the world even a part of the time any longer. 
And that means right here at home, as well as elsewhere. 
There is nothing emotional, nothing melodramatic, nothing 
of the boom sort about the onward march of temperance. 
It is just the cold, logical economic business argument that 
gives a man the alternative between his liquor and his 
position. The railroads began discharging drinking men 
for manifest reasons. The crusade has spread from voca- 
tion to vocation, until today it includes about every major 
means of making a livelihood. 

A young man recently wrote me this characteristic letter. 
I call it characteristic because it is what so many young 
fellows seem to think: 

"I will be thru school in a few weeks," he wrote. "I 
want to ask your advice. I wish you would tell me where 
a young man can go and have a chance to do something 
and be somebody. There doesn't seem to be a chance for 
a young man here in Kansas." Think of there being no 
chance for a young man in Kansas ! 

A boy or a young man must first make good — excep- 
tionally good— at or near home, before he can, or before 
he will be fit to make good somewhere else. And if he 
makes good at home, he will have no need to go farther to 
seek his fortune unless he wishes to. 

But the most pathetic picture of American life has been 
that of the untrained, helpless daughter, waiting around 
at home after her schooling was over, for some man to come 
along who was willing to support her. These helpless, am- 
bitionless creatures are fast disappearing. The new girl 
will be much more of a prize than the old type of girl, and 
she will be much more sought after. The new girl will not 
have the same temptation to sell herself for a home, for 
some one to support her, because she will be able to pro- 
vide for herself. 

The coming girl is going to be trained, is going to fit 
herself for some useful vocation, either at home or else- 



444 AN AGE FOR THE YOUNG 

where, which will make her self-respecting, self-supporting, 
independent if need be. 

Many, many boys who have in them the making of fine 
farmers and successful men come to the large city and take 
jobs from which they never can hope to rise. 

The girls have even less of a chance. Often they must 
work for a mere pittance, away from friends and with 
much less opportunity of ever having a home of their own. 

The cities are full of poor lawyers, poor doctors, poor 
insurance men, and poor office men — men who could have 
done far better at some other calling. Of the most favored, 
it is doubtful if more than one out of ten ever amasses a 
competency for old age or ever rises above the average 
level of existence if misfortune spares him that long. 

It is these things which make me wish to plead with 
parents and others, with you good people of Crawford 
county to extend your work in every possible way among 
the young people of this community. You must strive to 
make country life so agreeable and interesting for them 
that the boys and girls will stay here until they reach the 
years of discretion, when there can be less doubt of a wise 
choice of life work. This, my friends, is to their interest, 
your interest and the nation's interest. And being a busi- 
ness man myself, one who has lived 30 years in a city of 
50,000, I can say it without prejudice that one good farmer 
is worth more to Crawford county and the state of Kansas 
than ten average men engaged in commercial or industrial 
occupations in the large city, for he will be more really 
successful and live a happier and more wholesome life. 

I believe the farm and country life hold a bright future 
for country-bred and country-trained boys and girls. In 
my opinion theirs is the brightest prospect facing any of 
the young people of the United States at this time. Farm- 
ing is about the only calling not overcrowded. Our popu- 
lation already is growing faster than a million a year. 
The producer's services are to be appreciated and rewarded 
more and more. There are plenty of signs to indicate this 



WE MUST HAVE EDUCATION 445 

even now. The handicaps which have so long held the 
farming industry down are I believe soon to be removed 
as a means of salvation to the whole people; communica- 
tion with the best and wholesomest cultural attractions of 
the cities and towns will become easier and easier of acce^^s 
to farm folks, and before many years the dwellers on west- 
ern farms are going to be the most enviable people on earth. 
It is in the cities that the struggle for existence will grow 
keener and opportunities fewer. And so I urge my young 
friends to stay on the farm for the better time that is 
coming. 

Furthermore, we must encourage the idea of better 
schools for the country boy and girl, including the organ- 
ization of more consolidated district high schools, or rural 
township high schools. Farming demands educated men 
and women. 

Our agricultural colleges, neither in the classroom, nor 
in their extension service, can meet this need fully. Every 
boy or girl desiring the equivalent of a good high school 
education in and for agriculture should have the oppor- 
tunity of acquiring that training. 

We must work for better rural and grade schools for 
the benefit of the vast number of children unable to obtain 
the advantages of higher education; for more attention to 
the fundamental and practical in education, adjusting the 
schools to the vital needs of the people to meet the actual 
problems of everyday life. We appropriate over a million 
dollars a year for our colleges, and it is money well spent, 
but we should not forget that 95 per cent of the children 
of this state will never see the inside of a college. We must 
have education that will make bread-winners instead of 
dreamers, education that fits not alone the few for the life 
they are to live, but an education that will fit the many, 
the great body of the common people, the bone and sinew 
of the state, for what they will undertake, and give them 
an equal show in the race of life. 



MOBILIZING OUR BOY AND GIRL ARMY. 

From an Address at a Public Welfare Meeting, Salina, 
January 16, 1916. 

Probably I needn't remind you that I am not an orator. 
Neither am I a politician. I am simply a business man. 
But the older I grow, the more I appreciate my responsi- 
bility to society and my obligation to my state and my 
community, and this is my excuse for coming before you. 

We are hearing a great deal about compulsory military 
training. It is my opinion that our greatest and most im- 
portant defense against every ill in America and in Kansas 
is the American home. 

This is the age of conservation. But a conservation 
policy that does not conserve, nor promote, nor foster, nor 
protect the health, thrift and happiness of the American 
home — the source of all our strength and vigor as a nation 
— is an unspeakable sham. "We need this kind of a defense 
far more than we shall ever need a larger army or a bigger 
navy. Militarism is in fact an enemy of the home as well 
as a grievous burden for any land to carry. 

When we read of the millions of men in the trenches in 
Europe, it seems to us as if the world had taken up arms. 
Yet, under one flag, we have a larger, a more potent, a 
more powerful army in the United States in the 22 million 
children in American schools. 

When the warring hosts of Europe shall have vanished 
or laid down their arms, this huge American army of young 
citizens of the United States will be waxing stronger and 
stronger. 

What are we doing to mobilize them along the line of 
independent, self-supporting, high-quality citizenship? 

Here is the most potent force of modern times, the Amer- 

446 



DUTY OF PAEENTS AND TEACHERS 447 

ica of the near future. Here is the truly great and im- 
portant preparedness problem, beside which all other pre- 
paredness programs sink into insignificance. 

It is for us to mold and train this vast army of boys 
and girls, to have them fit into a useful, purposeful, whole- 
some life, contributing strength to their communities, to 
the nation and to their own well-being; or to so ineffec- 
tively prepare them that they will find with difficulty, if 
at all, the place in rank and file best suited to their powers, 
and therefore the post of their greatest service to their 
country and the commonwealth. Our homes should be 
what they have always heretofore aspired to be, the re- 
cruiting stations of good citizenship, trained in family dis- 
cipline, honor, thrift, patience, charity and good will. 
These are good Americanisms. They are the very corner- 
stones of all our character-building in the young, but they 
are not virtues that America has any patent right in. 

This is the great responsibility that rests not alone upon 
parents and teachers, but upon each and every man and 
woman in the United States at this hour. We should strive 
to realize it, and realizing it, strive to meet it courageously, 
enthusiastically and effectively. 

We might well begin by inculcating certain simple fun- 
damental standards of living and amenities of life. We 
could, for instance, eliminate some of the world's worst 
evils and brighten many of the world's darkest places, if 
by means of training, precept, or example, we had these 22 
million children daily saying "please" and "thank you." 

Twenty-two million children trying to do a kind act 
daily. 

Twenty-two million children resolving never to drink 
liquor, smoke cigars or acquire other bad habits. 

Twenty-two million children studying their lessons and 
training to be better citizens than their parents. 

Twenty-two million boys and girls speaking a good word 
for the American flag every day. 

We have come up thru hardships and adversity and 



448 MOBILIZING THE BOYS AND GIRLS 

are doing well in Kansas, but at the same time we are 
coming face to face with much the same world-old prob- 
lems which have wrecked empires, vanquished nations, 
erased peoples. 

I am not pessimistic about it, only deeply concerned and 
wishing every Kansan to realize to the utmost, the almost 
staggering responsibility that rests upon him, whether he 
thinks it does, or not. I know every man and every woman 
present has thought of some of these puzzling questions, 
frequently to consider them at public gatherings. 

Our standards are so wholesome in Kansas. We have 
labored so wisely and so well. Kansas is still so young, 
strong, clean and virile, that it seems inevitable that the 
nation must look to us and not in vain, for a way out of 
many great difficulties. 

We have done so well we must do far better. We must 
go on as we have begun, vigorously and persistently right- 
ing our errors, grappling with our difficulties, lining up, 
man to man and woman to woman, for the best in govern- 
ment, for the best in agriculture, for the best in educa- 
tion, in home life, in living ; for fair play and a square 
deal for boys and girls, and for men and measures, in a 
high and loyal spirit of co-operation and good will. 

As a people we are too generally intelligent, too generally 
forward-looking and enterprising, it seems to me, to fail in 
this great, big, fundamental purpose of life — home-making, 
nation-building. 

No nation can be better, can rise higher, than its homes. 
The American homo is the very foundation of tlie progress 
or failure of the American nation and we are discovering 
that there is something the matter with the American home 
of today. 

I think the trouble is largely due to the changed condi- 
tions of life and living, especially in our towns and cities. 
It is a world-wide change, but greater on this side of the 
world and affecting us more than any other people. Then 
in the rush and struggle of existence I think the fathers 



SOME UGLY FACTS OBSERVED 449 

have been too willing: to leave all the responsibilities of the 
home and the upbringing of the children to the mothers. 

Here are some ugly facts : We are the criminal nation. 
During the last twenty-five years, murder has increased 
200 per cent in this country. During the last twenty years 
tramp burglaries have increased 100 per cent. In 1910, for 
every million of our population 118 murders were com- 
mitted. Italy had only 15, Canada only 13, Great Britain 
and Ireland only 9. Germany only 5 — 5 to our 118. 

I am not alone in my opinion that this is largely a home 
problem, a home problem of the towns and cities. 

Ninety-two per cent of the bad boys and the wayward 
girls come from the towns and cities. Only 8 per cent 
from the country. These were the highly significant fig- 
ures that were given me upon the occasion of a recent visit 
to both the boys' and girls' reformatories in Kansas. Work 
and play is the rule in the country. It is mostly play in 
town. Few chores can be found for city children, so they 
become the prey of idleness and various distracting temp- 
tations. Wholesome and constant occupation is the safe- 
guard of youth. This is the reason so much attention is 
now being given to playgrounds in cities, to athletics at 
schools and to baseball and outdoor games everywhere. 

Wliile I was visiting the State Penitentiary at Lansing, 
Warden Codding, wiio has come in personal touch with 
some 3,000 prisoners during the last six years, told me 
that an examination of a thousand or more of these prison- 
ers, all under 30 years old, has convinced him that we are 
recruiting our criminals from an army of city boys. Half 
of these boys are not our boys, they are ' ' floaters, ' ' but the 
everlasting pity of it is that under different circumstances 
a great many of these boys would have become good citi- 
zens. I found that 68 per cent of the men in the Kansas 
penitentiary are under 30 years old, and it is the city life 
that sent them there. 

We are paying out 3Vo million dollars every day in this 
country for punishing crime. More than 15 per cent of 



450 MOBILIZING THE BOYS AND GIRLS 

the young- men in the Kansas penitentiary and boys' re- 
formatory at Hutchinson cannot read or write. 

Some day we shall learn that it is just as important for 
us to see that the child of somebody else is given an edu- 
cation as it is that our own should be trained. 

It is our duty to see that our future citizens are well 
born ; that they are properly nourished, and are reared in 
that environment most likely to develop in tliem their full 
capacity and powers. 

As one who has known and watched many boys, who has 
had hundreds of boys and young men work for him, and 
has seen what a miracle the right sort of encouragement 
works in boy nature, let me say a kindly word to these 
boys of Salina, who have honored me with their presence 
tonight. I talk to 3'ou, not as a preacher, or a reformer, 
or a faddist, but as a plain, everyday business man who 
has the greatest respect and admiration and real affection 
for boys. I want to see every boy in Salina become a man- 
sized man among men. And let me say it is no slianie for 
a strong, manly boy to be gentle. It is in fact, the hall- 
mark of his manhood. The American man or the Amer- 
ican boy, is not living up to the unwritten code of the 
American gentleman whenever he fails to show the utmost 
courtesy and respect to girlhood and womanhood, to his 
parents, and to the aged ; and kindness to the infirm and 
the unfortunate. 

Unfortunately lack of respect for the aged, lack of re- 
spect for the advice and counsel of parents, is a deeply 
marked characteristic of the present generation, along with 
an absence of worthy ideals. 

It should make us uneasy for the future of the state and 
nation, when the highest ideals of citizenship we can muster 
among them, range from the ambition to pose as the hero 
or heroine in a picture show to achieving distinction on 
the vaudeville stage, on the baseball diamond, or in the 
football field. Athletics are of course wholesome and bene- 
ficial — I am strong for all forms of clean sport — but as a 



THE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE 451 

life work, a career, a way to serve your community or your 
country, and be somebody yourself, almost anything? else 
is to be preferred. 

Many a m .n of middle age says to his fellow men: If 
I h d known as a young man half that my experience has 
taught me, T could have accomplished anything. 

The everlasting pity is that the world has to learn so 
many of the simplest but most vitally important lessons of 
life over and over again; that a father, and especially a 
father in these high pressure times, can tell his son so little 
that the bo}' will listen to, or heed; that a mother, appar- 
ently, can so seldom impress on her daughter that a mother 
knows the world and the best way for her daughter to meet 
and conquer its trials and difficulties, so much better than 
self-satisfied and wdllful sixteen. 

But, let me caution you that the young folk of today 
are not entirely to blame for their more than normal atti- 
tude of inconsequence toward life and life's duties and 
that inexorable future which comes to all and demands and 
collects in full for every mistake, and every misstep and 
every deviation from the straight line of perfection, truth 
and rectitude. 



A TALK ABOUT BOYS. 

From an Address at the Father and Son Banquet, 
Y. M. C. A., Barnes. 

T wish particularly to emphasize that one great need is 
more fatherhood in the American home. A father must 
not forget th-:it the boy of today is the man of tomorrow, 
and that, as his boy's father, he has more to do with mak- 
ing him the sort of man he should be than anyone else. 
If we leave it to idle companions and the pool hall pro- 
prietor to instruct and entertain him, we can predict al- 



452 A TALK ABOUT BOYS 

most to a certainty what will become of any boy. It is 
here that the father's duty and the father's responsibility 
become one. No one else is so powerful a guardian, guide, 
philosopher and friend to his boy as his f ither is. A boy's 
pattern is his father. And let mothers and fathers train 
their boys that the same moral standard must be lived by 
them as is demanded of our girls. 

If no other influences came in between a boy and his 
father, in a boy's life, a good father's example alone might 
be sufficient. But we know that this is not enough. The 
whole world realizes that a girl needs her mother, but few 
fathers realize that food, shelter, clothes and good school- 
ing are not all the parental attention that a boy should 
get from his father. These are necessities. But the great- 
est good, the greatest help that can come to any boy, is the 
encouragement, the inspiration and the comradeship of a 
father who hasn't forgotten that he once was a boy. 

Of only lesser degree is the friendly influence of any 
good man, boy-hearted enough to understand boys and be 
interested in them, and kind-hearted enough to wish to 
warm and brighten the life and prospects of some poor, 
neglected, or misdirected boy, by the sunsliine of his friend- 
ship and beneficence ; and when he has done that — by his 
fatherly counsel and advice. 

Let me tell you the boy does not get all of the benefit. 
It reacts on the man. Nothing pays such dividends in 
happiness as this service. I urge every man and every 
woman of mature years to try this experiment : If you 
have no son or no daughter of your own, acquire a friendly 
interest in the welfare of the boys and girls that you meet. 
Try to help someone else's boy, Avho needs your help. Help 
him to be clean and manly. Try to prevent someone else's 
girl from drifting into evil or from being led into error, 

Encoiiragee initiative. By no means throw the cold 
water of discouragement on the plans boys broach so hesi- 
tatingly or enthusiastically, even if you think you see fail- 



ENCOURAGE CLEAN SPORTS 453 

lire ahead. The experience is good. They learn by it. 
Encourage them to try — to keep trying. 

We have no more reason to expect a boy or a girl to be 
successful from the first in the execution of their plans, 
than to expect a baby to learn to walk at the first half- 
dozen attempts. 

Encourage games, good shows, clean sports, dancing, 
wholesome athletic play, like baseball, basketball, tennis, 
croquet. These are all cultural. Games and contests are 
great developers of leadership, teamwork, self-control. They 
supply an outlet for the superabundant energy which na- 
ture demands shall be worked off and which if not spent 
wholesomely, will wreck or injure the machine. They teach 
boys and girls, too, how to get thru the world on good 
terms with their fellows — invaluable knowledge when they 
come to enter tlie world as young men and women. 

Many parents of the present time, I think, are overlook- 
ing the steadying, character-forming influence of religious 
training for the young, which comes from regular attend- 
ance at Sunday school and the affiliation of the parents 
with the church. This was as much a part of the old- 
fashioned rearing of young people as attendance at public 
school. It has kept many of the older generation straight 
in time of temptation and comforted them in time of 
trouble. I should like to see restored the old custom of 
five minutes of Bible reading, and the prayer with which 
we formerly opened each day of school. Also a return to 
the old dictum of our childhood, that modesty and neatness 
in dress is becoming and seemly and that extreme styles 
and extravagant dressing are not only vain but ridiculous 
and foolish. 



NIGHT SCHOOLS AND PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 

From Address to Parent-Teachers' Association, TopeJca, 
September 8, 1915. 

We liave learned that mere intelligence is not enough 
to save a man's soul, or to save his body. We have learned 
that efficiency is the measure of all human endeavor. 

To know is something, but to do is more, and our edu- 
cational system, if it is to produce the men and womeii 
whom America needs, must, I believe, rest upon the basic 
idea of producing citizens who are individually trained to 
do the world's work. 

We are constantly boasting in America that there is room 
at the top. We have magnified our great men. Our gen- 
erals, our multi-millionaires, our statesmen, our preachers, 
our play actors have received an adulation, and a meed of 
praise, which the mighty Caesars and Alexanders may well 
have envied. And at the same time in this great republic, 
in this democracy, in this country which we call "the Land 
of the Free," we have been too prone to give but little 
concern to the welfare of that great mass of humanity 
which is doing the world's work, bearing the brunt of the 
struggle toward better things, and which must, of neces- 
sity, occupy what is called the "lower rung" of the ladder. 

The human factor in industry has been too much ne{^ 
lected, and at times, it seems to me, our public school 
system, as it is now organized, has been too much con- 
cerned in producing scholars rather than men and women. 
I am inclined to think we are giving too little heed to the 
actual needs of our people. 

I would like to see an efficient, up-to-date, well organ- 
ized public night school in Topeka. 

The night school is a natural product of social and in- 

4.-.4 



MANY ENVIRONMENTS ARE HOPELESS 455 

duslrial progress and will aid greatly in making the school 
system a more potent factor in the betterment of the masses. 
Such a school, with well-organized and well-co-ordinated 
courses which are designed to aid actual workers and which 
are adapted to the needs of the working classes, to me seems 
almost an imperative necessity for the great army of young 
men and women who otherwise are unable to receive any- 
thing but the rudiments of an education. 

There are hundreds of children in this city who have 
been born into almost hopeless environments. It is our 
business and our duty, my friends, to see to it that they 
have a chance to live for those things which make life 
worth while. The records sliow that about one-third of the 
boys and girls of Topeka do not even have the advantage 
of all the grades ; indeed many of them become a part of 
the w^orking world after completing the sixth and seventh 
grades. I am told that about one-fourth the children in 
this city did not attend school after their fifteenth birth- 
day. Over 60 per cent of our future citizens are going 
forth into their lifework without the equipment of at least 
an elementary schooling — without preparation and without 
adequate opportunity to acquire the benefits of education 
after they have entered the treadmill of daily life. It is 
from this class the army of life's misfits is recruited. I 
hold that it is the right of every boy and girl in this com- 
munity to have guaranteed to them by this city some form 
of education and training which will contribute to self- 
support. 

There are in the city of Topeka today about 12,000 school 
children of school age and yet only 8,333 — a little more 
than two-thirds — are actually in school. In our city, as 
in all others, there are economic conditions that prevent 
boys and girls from finishing the high school or even the 
grades. Not old enough to be accepted into -any industrial 
positions of importance, being prohibited by law and their 
own incapacity, they are thrown upon the mercies of a 
world not merciful but merciless, driven hither and thither 



456 PRACTICAL WORK IN NIGHT SCHOOLS 

without a safeguard or an anchorage; and. many of them 
naturally drift into paths which lead them into the army 
of criminals. I know you teachers will agree with me that 
it is the imperative duty of this community to provide for 
all these boys and girls during the most critical period of 
their lives. 

I believe the desire for knowledge is just as strong in 
the coalheaver's family as in the banker's home, and it 
should have the same opportunity to be gratified and en- 
couraged. I am inclined to think great numbers of our 
young men and women realize that they need the assistance 
of education in their daily work, and they are ambitious 
and industrious, but the public school is not within their 
reach. It is in session at precisely the time of day when 
many of them must be earning their daily bread. 

In this city, too, there are hundreds of grownup men 
and women, not old in years, yet probably aged by hard- 
ships, who need not charity, but tlie encouragement and 
the guidance to self-help which comes from a well-con- 
ducted public night school. The people who seek the bene- 
fits of such a school come with a purpose, and what is 
done for them would be quite sure to reach returns some- 
where near the 100 per cent mark. 

Altho nearly 20 per cent of the wage-earners of To- 
peka are foreign-born and foreign-trained, we still neglect 
to provide adequately for their future. Quite a number 
of these people are unable to speak the English Imguage. 
When a foreign citizen goes to the night school he learns 
not only the English language, but he also acquires a love 
for his newly-adopted country; you help him get on his 
feet in a new land; you help him become an intelligent 
member of our community, to have respect for our institu- 
tions and to cultivate a regard for law and order. The 
night school solves the immigrant question quicker than 
anything else, because the foreigner soon comes to recognize 
the teacher and the community as his friend and benefae- 



TOO MANY CHILDREN OUT OF SCHOOL 457 

tor. I think, therefore, we should encourage the public 
night school. 

I do not appear before you as a "knocker" on the public 
schools of Topeka; indeed, I think Topeka has special rea- 
son to be proud of her school system and the teaching staff. 
Our schools are admirably conducted and are, I believe, 
the equal of any public schools in the world. But may I 
venture the opinion that when more than 3,000 Topeka 
children remain out of the schools, as is the case at this 
very moment, and when many of those who do enter, re- 
main only to the end of the elementary course, there may be 
something wrong with our system of education. The fact 
that a large percentage of the pupils in the public schools 
leave even before finishing the grammar courses, and that 
less than 25 per cent ever enter high school, might suggest 
that our elementary and high schools do not emphasize as 
they should the courses that would be of the greatest bene- 
fit to those pupils in their lifework. Too much emphasis, 
possibly, has been placed upon the value of purely intel- 
lectual training, rather than an effort to generate an at- 
mosphere of wholesome respect for labor. If we are to 
have education that fits for life, we must have education 
that fits not the few for the life they are to live, but the 
many. 

I believe that the greatest weakness in our public school 
system is lack of thoro training, especially in the funda- 
mentals. Over 500 young men and women apply at my 
newspaper office every year for employment. Many of 
them are high school graduates. I am sorry to say that 
we are compelled to turn away more than half of this num- 
ber because they are unable to Avrite a legible hand or to 
spell many of the simplest words that appear in ordinary 
business correspondence. I fear, too, that the present sys- 
tem of over-educating may possibly bring some boys and 
girls out of the high schools who think they know so much 
that they don't want to work any longer with their hands. 
Unless the boys can get an easy job in an office they simply 



458 PRACTICAL WORK IN NIGHT SCHOOLS 

won't work, and the girls refuse to do housework. This 
is bad for the country because there is a shortage of intelli- 
gent, industrious workers. I think, therefore, we should 
devote more time to the common branches and the things 
in life that are of importance to people who work with 
their hands. Teach them thoroly so that the poor as 
well as the rich may be equipped to cope with the social 
problems that now confront modern society. Then if there 
are young people who want to go on with French and Ger- 
man and those things which go with higher education, there 
should be ample opportunity for that class also. 

I am inclined to think it might be well to give time to 
some of the scientific branches, so that when a boy or girl 
has gone thru the eight grades, both may possess a com- 
plete, practical education. When it is considered that for 
more than three-fourths of the Topeka boys and girls these 
. grades will be all the education which they will get, my 
contention assumes the proportions of an absolute right. 

In making an appeal for more attention to the common 
branches, I do not of course mean abandonment of high 
ideals of scholarship nor any diminution of regard for the 
higher education. I am willing to have all the culture and 
extra knowledge in the colleges, but the graded schools 
should be held closely to the groundwork of education. I 
only desire to emphasize the necessity of teaching the child 
more of the things that will mean bread and butter to him 
— the necessity of a larger amount of practical education 
to a larger number of people. 

Certainly our schools, with few exceptions, no longer 
teach a pupil thoroly how to write, nor to spell, nor to 
read. I would waste no time on the dead languages, but 
literature and language would be taught in such a manner 
that a love of the best literature and a desire to use refined 
language would be the aim of each pupil. Geography and 
history should be taught incidentally. Hygiene is entitled 
to a place in the course of study, and I would emphasize 
cleanliness in all Its relations to the human body ; as well 



MAKE THE SCHOOLS PRACTICAL 459 

as ventilation, proper heating and lighting of rooms, espe- 
cially the school room and sleeping room. The vocational 
subjects, such as manual training and domestic science, 
should be given, it seems to me, great prominence. I would 
endeavor to tlevelop every natural power to the highest 
degree and to teach every pupil, young and old, to think 
sanel.y. After eight years' schooling every parent has a 
right to expect that the state has given the child an educa- 
tion which will enable him to make his way in the world. 
When it fails to do this, as 1 think it does now, it is time 
to remedy things. 

In the elementary schools a few subjects are fundamental 
and these studies, if reasonably well mastered, form an 
infinitely better background for a child's future progress 
than any amount of half-learned miscellaneous stuff picked 
up at random from the various departments of science, 
art, civics, history or literature. 

I ask for a practical up-to-date, present-day school — a 
school that would be of direct practical service and that 
would widen the opportunities of every boy and girl in 
our city, and I am hai)py to say that in the Topeka schools 
most gratifying progress has been made in that direction. 



THE PROBLEMS OF HUMANITY. 

From an Address Delivered at Convention of Woodmen of 
the World, Pittshnrg, Kan., April 10. 1917. 

We live in a wonderful age. A few months ago I sat 
in Boston at dinner with the governors of 38 states. At 
each place at the table was an individual telephone. I 
raised the telephone at my place and talked clear across 
this great continent from Boston to San Francisco with 
Hiram Johnson, governor of California, and I heard his 
voice as distinctly as tho he Avere in the next room. 

Not long ago, I received at the state house in Topeka a 



460 THE PROBLEMS OF HUMANITY 

message from a friend who was a thousand miles out in the 
Pacific Ocean. He happened to remember it was my birth- 
day and fifteen minutes later his message was delivered to 
me by wireless telegraph. 

One evening last summer, seated on the veranda of my 
home, I heard a peculiar humming sound. Looking up I 
saw swooping down toward me a young friend of mine, 
Phil Bilkird, a Topeka boy I have known virtually all his 
life. Pie was in an airplane, largely of his own construct- 
ing, and he swooped down so close to the earth that I could 
plainly hear his voice in friendly greeting. 

It is a wonderful age in which you live. Who could have 
dreamed a few years ago of talking clear across this conti- 
nent or of receiving a wireless message flashed 3,000, 5,000, 
9,000 or 10,000 miles thru space in an instant? Who would 
have thought that a Kansas boy (and several Kansas boys 
have done it) could build his own airplane and navigate 
the air as gracefully and as swiftly as the eagle ? All these 
and many more marvelous things have come to pass within 
a few short years. 

And who can tell what marvel the next quarter of a 
century will produce? 

The world is not going to stand still. The great scientists 
know that the vast ocean of truth is still unexplored. The 
great inventors tell us that we have only made a beginning 
in subjecting to man's service the world-leaping forces of 
electricity and radio-activity which are still so great a 
mystery to us that nobody knows what they really are. 

We may expect much from science and invention in the 
next half century, but I believe, my friends, that the great- 
est progress we shall make will not be in material things, 
will not be in science or invention, but will be a great ad- 
vance along economic, social and humanitarian lines. It 
is a wonderful thing that anyone may talk across the con- 
tinent to another being, but it is a far greater thing to 
realize and to recognize that this being and every human 
l)eing between him and you, is a brother, with a brother's 



KNOTTY QUESTIONS MUST BE SOLVED 461 

claim on you. It is a miraculous thing to be able to step 
into a flying machine and rise above the surface of the 
earth on so impalpable a thing as air, but it is a greater 
thing to be able to do your part in lifting human society 
to a higher plane of living, to better economic conditions, 
to nobler ideas and higher principles. 

We have made great progress in material things, but I 
am happier in the belief that the minds of men, the minds 
of the Kansas people and of the American people have not 
been entirely engrossed with goods and chattels. We have 
not altogether ignored the greatest, the most vital problems 
of civilization, the welfare and the destiny of the human 
race. We have made a beginning toward solving some of 
the questions which have perplexed society thru all the 
ages, but I am strong in the faith that the next decade, or 
the next quarter of a century at farthest, will see the ac- 
tual solution of some of the knottiest of these questions of 
humanity. Nothing in this age or in any age is of greater 
importance, nothing more worth while can' engage your 
thought and mine and your effort and mine, and I beg of 
you for your own spiritual growth and satisfaction not to 
withhold anj^thing you can personally contribute to the 
betterment of human life and the true progress of the 
people. 



IMPORTANCE OF JUVENILE EMPLOYMENT. 

From an Address to the Kindergarten Teachers Associa- 
tion, First 31. E. Church, Topeka, Nov. 12, 1915. 

The Juvenile Flower club which we established six years 
ago in Topeka, has grown steadily. In that time we have 
given away over 75,000 packages of flower seeds. Last 
April more than 3,000 boys and girls called at The Daily 
Capital office and were enrolled as members of our club. 



462 IMPORTANCE OF JUVENILE EMPLOYMENT 

To be happy and eoiitented, a healthy, vigorous boy must 
have some sort of purpose or interest in life, the same as 
a man. He must work, to an end. He must accomplish 
something for himself. He must boss something. Every 
possible encouragement should be given by parents and 
teachers to boys and girls to earn something during vaca- 
tions. 

Which summer school will be most likely to lead a boy 
in the paths in which he should walk — for his good and 
ours — the school of idleness on the streets, among the dirt 
and filth of the alleys, or inspiring, helpful, elevating work 
in a flower or vegetable garden at home? I believe you 
will join with me in the hope that every back yard and 
every vacant lot in this community will next ye;ir be trans- 
formed into a garden where boys and girls may raise vege- 
tables, berries, fruits and flowers for pleasure and profit. 
It will mean not only cheaper living expenses, but also 
great benefits in the way of education and training. More 
than 5,000 school children in Topeka remain at home dur- 
ing the summer vacation without any useful, healthful, 
productive occupation requiring any large part of their 
time, while there is much valuable land in back yards and 
vacant lots that is serving no useful purpose. The object 
should be to bring idle land and children together, and you 
and I should help bring this about. It is difficult to esti- 
mate the far-reaching results of this plan when it shall be 
put in full operation thruout this city. For the children 
it will mean health, strengtli. joy in Avork. habits of 
industry, and understanding of the value of money as 
measured in terms of labor, and such knowledge of the 
pnenomena and forces of nature as must be had for an 
understanding of any of their school lessons. They will 
also learn something, at least, of the fundamental principle 
of morality; that each individual must make his or her 
own living; must, by some kind of labor of head, hand or 
heart, eontril)ute to the commonwealth as much as he takes 
from it ; must pay for what he gets in some kind of coin. 



HUMANE EDUCATION NECESSARY 463 

And along with nature study and the cultivation of a 
love for the beautiful, I should like to see more attention 
given to humane education, more instruction given to chil- 
dren that animals have rights which they should respect, 
that cruelty is contemptible and degrading, that kindness 
is the greatest promoter of happiness, and that justice, 
mercy and compassion are the noblest of virtues. 

The whole problem and the right method is to keep 
the boys and girls busy in a balanced program of school, 
play, home duties and interesting occupation. The wrong 
method, sure to result disastrously, is to let them run wild, 
cut loose from every anchorage, study or not as they feel 
like it, roam when and where they choose, loaf when they 
feel disinclined to apply themselves, rule the household 
instead of conforming to its regulations, being alwaj^s late 
at meals, going out at night whenever they choose and 
returning at any hour, etc., etc. These are the general 
symptoms of an unregulated young person who needs some 
wholesome interests and home oversight to set him right. 



FRIVOLITY A MODERN FAULT. 

From an Address to the Parent-Teachers Association, at 
the High School, Leavemvorth, Kan., May 23, 1916. 

I am thankful to say that the young women of Kansas 
dress with good taste and good sense. There are a few 
exceptions, possibly. That we do sometimes see them now, 
is not so much a reflection on empty-headed innocence as 
it is a proof there are foolish mothers and foolish fathers. 
Every overly self-conscious school girl simpering in a dress 
no school girl should wear, is the sign of a home where the 
simple, wholesome life of American tradition has been sup- 
planted by the popular craze for display and frippery. 
We are all more or less the victims of a wave of bad taste, 



464 FRIVOLITY A MODERN FAULT 

a lowering of standards of conduct, a universal rag-time 
of the tiddle-de-winks of life. We need to get back to that 
wholesome simplicity from which we started. I do not 
mean that we should live meagerly or parsimoniously, but 
that we sheuld go back to the solid, substantial things of 
life, to standards of living which benefit the individual 
instead of injuring him, which tend toward human prog- 
ress, toward uplifting liunianity, and not toward a lower- 
ing of the stamina of the people. 

At no time since books have been common in the world, 
have boys and girls known so little about the great books, 
the great deeds, the great personages of history, religion, 
poetry, art, science, discovery and statesmanship. The 
present day high school graduate's ignorance of such 
knowledge is pitiful and appalling and the reason of it is 
the many distractions, the constant search for further ex- 
citements and diversions which leaves no time for such 
comparatively slow and stupid things as reading and books. 
We are ere long to learn that we must go back to whole- 
some diversions and simpler living, to have a time for play, 
a time for work and for those other things which round 
out and develop well-balanced men and women. 

Speed mania, dissipation, too many distractions, over- 
stimulation of the emotions, are giving the boys and girls 
of today fatally wrong ideas of life. It is almost a national 
peril. It threatens a generation of marital unhappiness 
and misery. The world never has seen a more difficult 
age in which to properly rear a boy or girl. 

It is little less than criminal to bring up a l)oy or girl 
in idleness and without teaching them the good old-fash- 
ioned virtue, thrift. Too many boys and girls are being 
brought up to receive continually and give practically 
nothing in return. This makes them selfish and trifling. 
Inculcating the doctrine of thrift would have a wonderful 
bearing upon lessening criminal costs, suicides, divorces, 
dissipation and calls for charity. 

Neither Leavenworth nor any other city may claim to 



GIVE EVERY CHILD A CHANCE 465 

be rich or great or a good place for homes as long as there 
is one child within its borders that is not properly fed, 
clothed, sheltered, trained and schooled. 

In the homes and the schools of Kansas, Kansas is al- 
ways in the making. They are the sources of our growth 
and progress in any and every direction. Their standard 
will be our standard. As they are we shall be. We can 
rise no higher than they rise. 

I wish every boy and girl in Kansas, no matter how 
humble his home, to have a fair chance at the door of op- 
portunity. If we are going to do that, we must have edu- 
cation that fits not alone the few for the life they are to 
live, but an education and training that will fit the many, 
the great body of the common people, the bone and sinew 
of the state, for what they will undertake, an education 
that will make bread-winners rather than dreamers of the 
children of Kansas, and give them an equal show in the 
race of life. 

To do this we must give them training that will be useful 
in the earning of a livelihood, and teach them the satis- 
faction that comes from doing an honest day's work intelli- 
gentlj^ and well. 

Every city and employment center is cluttered with half- 
educated, undisciplined, indifferent applicants for work — 
young people which it seems our free public school system 
should have developed into some semblance of intelligence 
and usefulness. The hearts and minds of these young peo- 
ple are seldom on their work. They seem never to learn 
what their duties are or to learn to do them without being 
told to do them. They have no conception of how much 
they lack, and they have a self-esteem out of all proportion 
to their scanty attainments. And for this the schools are 
only partly to blame. 

In the main- — and this brings us right back to the begin- 
ning of the argument — these young people have been too 
much indulged, or too much neglected, at home. "We need 
more of the simple, old-fashioned home life, with its cer- 



466 FRIVOLITY A MODERN FAULT 

tain tasks and responsibilities assigned to every member 
of the family, and stated times for doing these tasks; also 
for study and for play. And don't forget wholesome play, 
for -we are learning that it has an important and a far- 
reaching influence in a child's education and his success 
in life. 



LACK OF THORONESS IN MODERN TRAINING. 

From an Address at ihe 31. E. Church, Arka)isas City, 
Kan., January 23, 1916. 

I find that more than 85 per cent — that moi-e than three 
out of every four of our future citizens of Kansas — are 
going into their life work without preparation. I am sorry 
to say that six out of ten children in my city do not attend 
school after their fifteenth birthday. 

Economic conditions are making the struggle for exist- 
ence harder and harder, Avhile it seems to me our prepara- 
tion is less and less thbro. For years I have been an 
employer of young men and young women in Topoka. A 
greater part of tlie time we have more than 500 on the 
payroll. 

In the coarse of a year as many as one thousand young 
men and young women apply for work. Investigating what 
these applicants have to offer is our saddest experience. 
The first touchstone question, "What can you do?" nearly 
always leaves them without an answer. They never have 
done anything. They never have been fitted for anything. 
They never have really mastered the simplest things. 

To meet, in the course of a year, hundreds of such young 
people as I have had to, is pitiful, is disheartening, is al- 
most heartbreaking. You feel so sorry for them. You 
wonder what is to become of them. You wish you could 



WHAT BECOMES OF THE UNTRAINED 467 

do something for them, that you had the time, the power 
and the means to turn your business into a school of appli- 
cation and training that these misfits in the scheme of life 
might be given a chance to acquire some self-supporting 
employment. 

In fact every large business is to some extent a training 
school, of necessity, but there is a limit beyond which it is 
possible for any business to go in developing efficient work- 
ers from the raw^est of material ; and so many, so very 
many of these applicants for work are absolutely so un- 
tutored, so untrained, so unequipped to do the simplest 
things. 

What becomes of these neglected young people? 

Doubtless experience, the dearest teacher of all, and the 
most pitiless, does teach some of them something, whereby 
at least they become the proverbial square pegs that fit in 
round holes. For the rest statistics are beginning to re-- 
turn an illuminating answer. 

The latest statistics show there are 250,000 persons in 
the United States making a living from crime. Another 
100,000 are in the jails and penitentiaries. Another 50,000 
constitute the class known as hoboes. And it is the Amer- 
ican boy and not the foreign born boy who gives us this 
crime problem. 

Another answer to the question what becomes of the un- 
trained, is returned by the president .of a school of busi- 
ness efficiency and salesmanship. He says 95 per cent of 
all the men of America are incompetent thru lack of 
proper training to make a success in any trade, business 
or profession. 

We may think his figures a little high and possibly they 
are high, but in the average community, in proportion to 
the whole number, how many men are there who may be 
called really successful? 

Again we are told that 90 per cent of the men in this 



468 LACK OF THORONESS IN TRAINING 

country at the age of 65 are dependent either wholly or in 
part upon their relatives, their friends, or on charity, for 
support. 

Of course this huge per cent of failures in later life, if 
the figures are accurate, probably has numerous contrib- 
uting causes; but the chief one, possibly, was lack of par- 
ental training in the virtues of thrift and providence ; also, 
possibly, many had to begin with a handicap of little or 
no earning power, and were long in overcoming it, missing 
many opportunities for betterment and promotion on the 
way. 

One other thing that statistics seem to show has special 
bearing on the subject we are considering. A study of 
prison populations shows that there are very few men with 
trades in the penal institutions of this country. For ex- 
ample, where there were 160 persons confined in the Kan- 
S'.'S prison, there was not a single carpenter, bricklayer, 
plasterer, tailor, printer, painter or a member of the other 
skilled crafts, to be found. Seventy-two per cent of the 
prisoners at Lansing have no trade or regular calling. 

The moral is: Have your boy learn a trade. 

I hold that it is the right of every boy and every girl 
in every community in Kansas, to have guaranteed to them 
by the district, the county, the city and the state some 
form of education and training which shall make them 
self-supporting workers and useful members of society. 

"After eight years' schooling every parent has a right to 
expect that the state has given his child an education which 
will enable him to make his way in the world. When it 
fails to do this, as sometimes I think it does now, it is time 
to remedy such a serious deficiency. What I ask is that 
our boys and girls, when they leave school, shall have at- 
tained knowledge and training which will make them bet- 
ter citizens of Kansas, which shall better equip them to 
enter upon tlie duties of life and give them a high and true 
ideal of what constitutes good citizenship. 



COUNTRY'S ADVANTAGES OVER THE CITY. 

From an Address at the Marysville, Kan., High School, 
May 19, 1915. 

I want to say to every ambitious young man and woman 
in this community, in every Kansas community — don't go 
away from Kansas to the large cities. Our state needs 
especially every boy and girl, and needs them where they 
are — not in the big cities. 

Never in the history of the world has the large town or 
the great city had so little to offer the boy or girl from 
the country as tod;iy. Fortunately, we have few large 
cities in Kansas to lead these boys and girls into the many 
blind alleys of futureless work which abound in these con- 
gested centers where the struggle for existence is keener 
than ever before and the rewards correspondingly small, 
where the temptations are many and especially strong for 
those who have seldom been subjected to the allurements 
and the distractions continually spread before city-bred 
boys and girls to their harm. 

I hope none of the boys and girls I see here and there 
in this gathering will think I am their old friend Gloomy 
Gus, or that I am conspiring with those who love them 
most dearly to put up a job on them, whereby they will 
have to hang up their hats and coats in the future, study 
more and work harder. It is for you and your best inter- 
ests that I am talking here at all. I once was a boy myself 
and I never have gotten over liking boys and liking to be 
with boys. I know the girls pretty well, too, for no man 
ever grew up with finer sisters: 

Now let me tell you by way of a little encouragement, 

469 



470 KANSAS BOYS AND GIRLS 

what I think about you boys and girls. I haven't seen 
better nor finer boys and girls anywhere in my travels 
than I see here. 

It has long been my opinion that Kansas has the best 
boys and girls in America, anyway. I think it always will 
have, and I am going to see, so far as I am personally able 
to bring it about, that you boys and girls have every chance 
to become happy and successful men and women in the 
best state, in the best country in the world, in which a boy 
or girl can be born and grow up. 

I want every one of you boys and girls to know that you 
have a very real and true friend in Topeka. If ever 1 can 
help you, if ever I can do anything to make you happier, 
I want you to come to me as freely as you would go to 
any good uncle you are fond of, and who is fond of you. 
AVhether I am a state official or a private citizen, you will 
find the door open and somebody inside who will be truly 
glad to see you. I shall be that somebody as I expect to 
be at work in Topeka for the next fifty years, and your 
friend and well-wisher always. 



IMPORTANCE OF PARENTAL INFLUENCE. 

From an Address at Father and Son Banquet, United Pres- 
byterian Church, TopeJca, April 26, 1916. 

The most interesting part of my work as governor is at 
the state institutions. I have spent much time among the 
unfortunate boys at the State Reformatory school at Hutch- 
inson and the little fellows at the Boys' Industrial Reform 
School in North Topeka, and have talked with most of them 
personally. I say to you frankly that practically all of 
the 340 young men in the Hutchinson Reformatory are 
there because they failed to receive the friendly interest, 
the companionship and sympathy and confidence of their 



IMPORTANCE OF PARENTAL INFLUENCE 471 

fathers. They became street-corner loungers, pool-room 
loafers, and crap-shooters. Then they got to drinking and 
gambling, and then it was only a short step to jail or state 
prison. But the blame is not all with the parents. A fine 
looking 18-year-okl boy at Hutchinson said to me the other 
day : "I made the mistake of my life when I forgot that 
my father is the best friend I ever had. My father begged 
me to cut loose from the fast crowd and go to work, but I 
thought I knew more than he did. I have had my lesson. 
I have paid dearly for my fun." 

Another fine looking boy said to me : "I got to drink- 
ing. That's why I am here. I wish you would tell every 
boy in Kansas that nine out of ten boys behind the bars 
can trace their troubles back to idleness and booze. Tell 
them to let it alone." 

Another young man now behind the prison walls at 
Lansing said to me : "I never had a mother and all I 
learned from my father was to avoid him. No one ever 
helped me. No one was enough interested in me to tell 
me what it all meant. I got in with a bad gang. We went 
from bad to worse. In a drunken fight I shot a man and 
now I am here for life. I am the goat. I tell you I have 
not had a fair chance." And I agree with this young man, 
that the community in which he lived is to blame. The 
citizens were sending money to the heathen in India and 
China but they were neglecting their own boys. 

A gray-haired old man, a stranger to me, with a sigh 
on his lips and a sob in his heart, called at my office in the 
state house one afternoon last February and with tears in 
his eyes, said : ' * I wish you would help me find my son. 
I need him. I am left without a friend in the world. Six 
years ago I quarreled with the boy. I cursed him and that 
night he disappeared. There has not been a day since then 
that I have not wished to have him back. I need him for 
I am here destitute, broken in health, and without a friend 
in the world." 

No son goes far wrong wlio is a comrade and bosom 



472 CHILDREN ARE EASILY LED 

friend of his father, and no father dare look such a son in 
the eye and be a rascal. One helps and holds the other at 
the time each needs the help of the other. There is nothing 
finer than to see father and son at the ball game, each 
rooting lustily for the home team. The* father may be a 
busy man, but making money becomes too big a price to 
pay for starving a son of his father's affections, or a father 
of the richest treasure that can be his — the delight and 
companionship of his own son. 

No boy or girl can be driven ; but tliey can be led, and 
if parents would live again their own boj^hood and girl- 
hood days in comradeship with their sons and daughters, 
much sorrow and distress would be avoided. 



KANSAS NEEDS HER YOUNG PEOPLE. 

From an Address to the Students of the Norton Schools, 
June 18, 1918. 

I wish you boys and girls to know that what I am to 
say to you tonight comes from the heart. But it is not 
going to be a lecture nor a sermon, simply a little plain 
talk from a business man who is deeply interested in the 
boys and girls of Kansas, as much so as the fathers and 
mothers and the uncles and tlie aunts who are here tonight. 
And that, I think, is putting it strongly. 

As one who has known and watched many boys and girls, 
who has had hundreds of young people work for him, who 
has seen what a miracle the right sort of appreciation 
Avorks in young folk, I wish to say a cordial and a kindly 
word of encouragement to you boys and girls of Norton 
who have honored me witli your presence this evening. I 
am going to talk to you, not as a preacher, nor as a re- 
former, nor as a faddist, but as a plain everyday b^^siness 
man who has the greatest respect and admiration and the 



KANSAS NEEDS HER YOUNG PEOPLE 473 

warmest affection for Kansas young folk. I have faith in 
them and in you, for I know your hearts are right and 
where the heart is right the head can seldom go wrong. 

I want you young men and young women to believe there 
are great opportunities right here in Kansas — not in Cali- 
fornia nor in New York— I say there were never greater 
opportunities in any country or in any state — the oppor- 
tunities for business — for everything that is worth living 
for on earth. It is not necessary to go to a far-off city 
to be a success. 

Kansas needs you. Kansas will appreciate you. And I 
believe, taking every condition into consideration, life in 
Kansas has most to offer you. Don't go away from Kan- 
sas. With all its fine resources, all its almost limitless pos- 
sibilities, it needs every trained man and woman it has 
produced. It would be a poor testimony of gratitude to 
desert the state that made you. No country in the world, 
no other state, holds better chances for the man willing to 
do his part in life, not alone for material success — for that 
M'ould be a poor conception of life's duties — but also for 
the ennobling opportunities to be found in everyday life. 
To be great at all, you must begin where you are. He who 
would be great anywhere must begin by being great in his 
own town. 

Vice, graft, disease, plunder are rampant in our big 
cities. Mantraps and pitfalls abound in them. Side by 
side are the slum and the palace, the saloon and the brothel, 
the sweat shop and the tenement, the jail and the reforma- 
tory, great wealth and extreme poverty, the master and 
the slave — noise, dirt, foulness, decay, glitter and sham. 
Against this Kansas offers independence, opportunity com- 
mensurate with industry, a competence and more, the re- 
spect and friendship of neighbors, a part and a place in 
the life of the community, health and happiness. 

I believe in the wisdom of every-day common sense. The 
really great man is a plain, straight-forward, every-day 
common-sense man. And it is possible for every man to 



474 KANSAS NEEDS YOUNG PEOPLE 

be a great man in this country. We ought to teach that 
however humble a man's station may be, if he does his full 
duty in that place in which he is put, he is just as much 
entitled to our respect and honor as the head of the nation. 

Success consists in learning to do and in doing the com- 
mon things in life uncommonly well. You may be only a 
mule driver of the coal wagon, but if you do the work a 
little better than the next man, you are on the royal road 
to success. I should much rather be the best bootblack or 
the best janitor in the town than the lawyer or doctor or 
printer known to his neighbors as a hopeless failure. 

I know fifty or a hundred worthless dudes and cheap 
sports in my town — and you probably have a few in your 
town — who spend their time lounging about the pool rooms, 
the street corners and other loafing places. They haven't 
earned a dollar in six months, but are complaining every 
day that there is no chance in the town for a young man. 

No j^oung man need be discouraged because he has no 
money to start with. It is my observation that the boy of 
poor or humble parents stands a better chance of making 
good than the son of wealth and luxury. Loose ideas about 
life, little or no training, money and automobiles — so com- 
mon with the average son of indulgent and wealthy par- 
ents, has caused the downfall of many of these young men 
and the lack of incentive or of ambition in others. 

And, young women, there are opportunities for you, 
too. Over % million women are now engaged in profes- 
sional pursuits. I know a Kansas woman who is earning 
more than $5,000 a year in the banking business; another 
Kansas woman earned almost as much in lawyers' fees and 
more than one hundred women in this state receive good 
incomes for their services as ])hysicians. 

Jolm J. Fngalls said o])portunity knocked but once. I 
think he was mistaken. If he had said "once a day" he 
would have been nearer the mark. It is the small oppor- 
tunities seized and realized that have made the l)ig men. 



MAKE YOUR OPPORTUNITY 475 

Make your opportunity. The materials lie all around you 
— on every hand. 

The world reserves its highest prizes for tlie man who 
is not afraid to work, who is willing to learn from every- 
. thing and everybody around him; who, no matter whit 
difficulties rise in his w^ay or what obstacles confront him, 
never gives up, but persists until he has won the prize, 
and he doesn't quit then. 

Ten years ago a young man from Greenleaf, Kan., 
walked into my office and applied for work. "I'm not 
too proud to tackle anything that will give me a start," 
he announced. He was not puffing at a cigarette. He 
was not wearing flashy clothing. He looked clean. I 
started him at $10 a week. He had good stuff in him. 
He had persistency and pluck and was always on the job. 
Today, I am paying him $6,000 a year and I would em- 
ploy half a dozen more like him at the same price if I 
knew where to find them. 

I give it to you as a business man's experience and 
observation that the use of liquor is the rock upon which 
more young men are hopelessly wrecked than any other. 
The young man who drinks voluntarily handicaps himself 
in the race of life. The employers of 85 per cent of the 
employed in the United States refuse to keep a man on 
their payrolls who drinks intoxicating liquor. 

Booze is the greatest curse in this country today. The 
warden of the Kansas penitentiary told me the other day 
that of the 840 men in the Kansas prison, 765 admit they 
are there because booze got the best of them. Big league 
ball players nearly all are teetotalers for they know that 
whisky paralyzes purpose, deadens courage and makes them 
muff the real opportunity. Select 100 of the best young 
men in Norton ; divide them into groups of fifty ; let one 
group use intoxicating liquor and the other drink water. 
Those who drink water will win the honors in school, take 



476 KANSAS NEEDS YOUNG PEOPLE 

the prizes on the athletic fields, and prove their superiority 
in every line of endeavor. 

Another thing : No argument can possibl y be made for 
the cigarette habit. A six weeks' scholarship test in the 
Ponca City high school between 21 boys who smoked and 
42 non-smokers, showed the non-smokers averaged 6 per 
cent higher in their grades than the smokers. This is 
pretty strong confirmation that smoking injures a growing 
boy's mental development and may stunt him mentally for 
life. Don't get the habit, boys. 



TEACH THRIFT TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE. 

From an Address to the Night School at the High School 
Auditorium, Kansas City, Kan., February 3, 1916. 

I went to work when I Avas 13 years old. Fortunately 
I had a father and mother who taught me habits of indus- 
try and obedience and thrift. My father never gave me 
a dollar of spending money in my life but he provided me 
with ample opportunity to earn all I needed. This prac- 
tical home training has proved to be a rich legacy to me 
and for many years I .have been zealously preaching to 
my young friends the gospel of work, of self-reliance, of 
sobriety and economy. I believe in helping our boys and 
girls to help themselves. 

T saw two line-ups in Kansas City one day last winter 
that told more than words. One was the bread line-up of 
the hungry, the hoineless, tlie dejected. Booze brought 
that line there. Two blocks away I saw another line-up 
in the lobby of a big bank. There were wage-earners of 
all classes waiting to put away their savings. Industry 
and thrift brouglit them there. 

It cannot be said, however, that we are a frugal people. 
"We spend our money extravagantly and heedlessly. We 



THRIFT IS CAREFUL SPENDING 477 

squander every year 70 millions on tobacco and 13 millions 
on chewing gum. The movies get 1 million every day from 
the public ; 800 millions go every year for jewelry and plate, 
500 millions for automobiles, more than 2 billions for intoxi- 
cating liquors. In Switzerland five hundred out of a thou- 
sand persons have money in the bank; in America only 
ninety-nine out of a thousand and a majority of these are 
foreigners. Statistics show that ninety-seven per cent of the 
people of our country are wholly or partly dependent on 
friends, relatives or charity at the age of 65 years — all on 
account of extravagance, wastefulness, educational defi- 
ciency or economic inefficiency. 

Thrift is careful spending as well as wise saving. We 
never have kno^vn a more reckless and extravagant period 
in American life than this period. Children who formerly 
were taught to save, now often outdo their indulgent par- 
ents who frequently are compelled to deprive themselves 
that their sons and daughters shall have every wish grati- 
fied. No boy or girl can have a worse start in life. There 
is no more important training for a child than teaching 
it to save and invest its savings, until such a habit is ac- 
quired. Thrift means better, higher, saner living; better 
homes, happier and better-conditioned people. It develops 
character, self-control, self-denial. 

Extreme fashions and extravagant dressing create shal- 
low, false standards of life in young people, and cast preju- 
dices and distinctions. Nothing but flash, frivolity and 
wickedness c;;n ever come of this indulgence. There never 
has been a more attractive setting for modest girlhood and 
sweet-faced womanhood, than neatness and modesty in 
dress. It inspires higher admiration and truer respect for 
women in men. It develops higher character and purer 
and nobler womanliness in women. 

It is to the credit of Kansas women generally that, 
strongl}^ influenced by fashion as they are, they deride 
these ridiculous exhibitions of extravagance, bad taste and 
semi-indecency. Our fashions are designed to fit the whims 



478 TEACH THRIFT TO YOUNG PEOPLE 

and the purses of the very small, restless, idle, unhappy 
class of over-wealthy women, the drones of the race, who 
perpetually are seeking for they know not what, in new 
sensations and wasteful extravagances. Why should sensi- 
ble, lovable and truly beautiful and worthy womanhood 
ape such inanities? 

Before I close, let me say that a college education is 
valuable to young men and young women, no matter 
what their lifework may be, and when they have completed 
their high school course I urge them to make every possible 
effort to secure the benefit of college training. I am not 
myself a college man, but I always have felt the need of 
the training that comes from a few years spent at one of 
the higher institutions of learning. Colleges are becoming 
more practical every day. They benefit not only those 
who engage in professional pursuits, but they help in agri- 
culture and in all the industries by producing workmen 
who are more efficient. Statistics gathered by President 
Waters of the Kansas Agricultural College show that the 
labor income of farmers who are college graduates is 191 
per cent ahead of the labor income of farmers with only 
common school educations. You may be interested to know 
that of the 27,000 students in Kansas colleges at this time 
more than one-half of the boys and one-third of the girls 
are paying their way. This is ample proof that Kansas 
boys and girls have good stuff in them. There is no valid 
excuse for failing to obtain a college education on the part 
of the boy or girl who really wants one. If you have 
health and strength and no one dependent upon you, you 
can work your way thru any Kansas college. 



FARMING AND FARMERS' PROBLEMS 

As one of the leading agricultural publishers of the coun- 
try, Mr. Capper has frequently been called on for addresses 
before farmers' organizations, such as agricultural socie- 
ties, granges, farmers' unions, etc. The problems of the 
farmer have ever been close to him and he has given utter- 
ance to many helpful suggestions. Portions of addresses 
to farmers and in behalf of farmers and their problems 
may be found in the following pages. 



KANSAS AGRICULTURAL PROBLEMS. 

From an Address to the Effingham Farmers, Oct. 8, 1915. 

A new and appropriate name has been found for the 
American farmer. He is now being called the "Paymaster 
of Industry." And that is exactly what he is. Farming 
is the great American industry. Manufacturing comes 
next and is a mighty poor second in spite of. all the atten- 
tion and all the favors it gets. 

The American farmer has more capital invested than 
any other man in any other industry. 

He is producing more steidily than any other man in 
any other industry and he is giving greater returns for 
every hour's work done than any other man in any other 
industry. 

This is not hot air. These are cold facts. 

The American farmer is contributing every year about 
12 billions of dollars annually to the welfare of the Amer- 

479 



480 KANSAS AGRICULTURAL PROBLEMS 

ican people. The railroads get about l^/i billion, the manu- 
facturers 41/^ billions, the bankers 200 millions, the mer- 
chants 31/2 billions, the miners more than a half billion, 
and a miscellaneous payroll takes the rest. 

When he has met these obligations, the man on the farm 
has left for himself and his family about what would con- 
stitute day wages. Mainly, this is because his is the only 
industry unorganized, and because he must pay more in- 
terest for money with which to finance his business than 
any other person on earth. 

A little more money for his year's work than if he had 
hired himself out as a farm hand, is what the Agricultural 
Department finds the average farmer gets. 

Tho his investment is about as great as that of the 
average business man, the average farmer is rewarded with 
little or nothing for the risk that he takes or the responsi- 
bility he assumes. 

Among the causes of turmoil from which the farmer is 
suffering may be mentioned too many middlemen, lack of 
a well organized system of co-operative marketing and dis- 
tribution, the lame-duck commission man, and the great 
need of farm credit for the tenant farmer as well as the 
land owner. 

The consumer cannot expect any decided recession of 
prices as long as the war lasts. On the farm and in the 
factory we are soon likely to be the busiest people in the 
world. Since war was declared 175 million bushels of 
wheat have been shipped to Europe — much more than a 
million bushels a day. For one, two or three years, more 
than 374 million people, representing the population of 
the countries at war, must look to us for nearly all the 
necessities of life, not simply during the war, but during 
several years of reconstruction after peace is declared ; 
before the ruin of European agriculture can be restored 
and its farm population again recruited ; before its mills 
and factories can again be set going. The resources of the 



FARMERS MUST CO-OPERATE 481 

United States as a producing nation are to be tested as 
they never have been tested before. 

We must get busy on the farm, busy in the factory, 
busier than we ever have been. 

In my opinion American farmers should begin prepar- 
ing for this contingency now. They should prepare for 
it by organizing their industry co-operatively from the 
ground up and begin by organizing the home community 
first. 

I needn't tell you that farmers will begin to succeed 
when they begin to co-operate ; that great help will come 
from a good co-operative system of rural credit. Sooner 
or later we are going to get one ; a system which will pro- 
vide something better than a verbal promise that a loan 
may be renewed if circumstances make a renewal necessary. 

The farmers of the United States are borrowing more 
than 2 billion dollars a year on their land alone and are 
buying credit at from 6 to 25 per cent. Nobody else pays 
as much for it. 

Co-operative rural credit will be a godsend to any state, 
especially to western states. It is going to come, but it 
will come sooner if we begin actively to agitate and pro- 
mote its coming. The first system adopted may not meet 
all requirements, but it will lead to perfecting the best 
possible system based on our own needs and experience. 
We probably shall see both state and national systems and 
the one found most worthy will survive. 

You have my heartiest support and best wishes in your 
effort to see that all the country schools in a county get 
equal support, according to their needs, from the county's 
school fund. Every Kansas boy or girl should come out 
of the common school with a complete, practical education, 
and with training in some special line of work that will fit 
them to earn a livelihood. This is vastly important to your 
children and to the state. It will depend largely upon 
getting more first-class teaching in country schools by per- 
sons who know and are in sympathy with country life. To 



482 KANSAS AGRICULTURAL PROBLEMS 

get this kiud of teaching we shall have to make it worth 
while for men and women to give their lives to it. The 
thing that will help us to it quicker than any other is the 
rural high school wherever conditions make it possible. 

Farming demands educated men and women. The agri- 
cultural colleges and universities, neither in the class room 
nor in their extension service can meet the full need. 
Every farm boy or girl desiring the equivalent of a good 
high school education, including instruction in agriculture, 
animal husbandry, horticulture, manual training and 
domestic science, should have the opportunity at home of 
acquiring that training. We must wprk for better rural 
and grade schools for the benefit of the vast number of 
children unable to obtain the advantages of higher educa- 
tion ; we must work for more attention to the f und:\mental 
and practical in education; and for open school houses for 
the public and the encouragement of the social center idea 
in every community. 

I think it has come about tliat we look to tlie good men 
— and to the good women, too — who live in the country and 
in the sni:dler towns, to lead the way in both moral and 
economic reforms. Without making anj-- pretense to states- 
manship, without posing as moral philosophers, the plain, 
every-day farmers of America, by the application of every- 
day common sense and common honesty and common de- 
cency to the problems of the states, are a greater influence 
in keeping the American people in the right track and 
keeping alive that righteousness wliich cxaUcth a nation. 



STAY ON THE FARM— DON'T GO TO BIG CITIES. 

From an Address at the Idana Farmers' Picnic, 
August, 1915. 

It seems to me we have lost too many bright young men 
and women who should have remained on the farm and in 
the rural communities. For half a centurv our national 



COUNTRY LIFE IS WHOLESOME 483 

system of taxation and our commercial system lias placed 
high premiums upon city life and has discouraged rural 
farm life — with the inevitable result that our city popula- 
tion has increased in the past few decades far out of all 
proportion to the increase of farm population. Twenty 
years ago the cities contained only 20 per cent of our pop- 
ulation; today nearly 50 per cent of our people live in the 
cities. And aside from the luring opportunities for mak- 
ing money, the '"call of the city" is perliaps a wholesome 
craving, born as it is of the desire for fellowship, for 
amusement and culture. But the cost of gratifying this 
desire in the city is very great, involving loss of neighbor- 
liness, curtailment of freedom, sacrifice of identity. 

The clean, wholesome life of the Kansas country folk as 
we find it typified in a quiet, decent, law-respecting com- 
munity like yours, is far and away the happiest, the most 
useful life. We must, therefore, both from an economic 
and moral motive, do everything possible to keep our peo- 
ple, who live in the country and the small towns, from 
rushing into the already overcrowded cities and becoming 
consumers instead of producers. We must do everything 
possible to keep the best brains of the nation where the 
best brains originate — in the rural districts. They'll not 
be wasted there. 

I want to say to every ambitious young man and woman 
in this community, in every Kansas community — don't go 
away from Kansas to the large cities. Our state needs 
especially every farm boy and girl, and needs them on the 
farms — not in the big cities. 

Never in the history of the world has the large towii or 
the great city had so little to offer the boy or girl from 
the country as today. Fortunately, we have few large 
cities in Kansas to lead these boys and girls of the farm 
into the many blind alleys of futureless work which abound 
in these congested centers where the struggle for existence 
is keener than ever before and the rewards correspond- 



484 STAY ON THE FARM 

ingly small, where the temptations are many and especially 
strong for those who have seldom been subjected to the 
allurements and the distractions continually spread before 
city-bred boys and girls to their harm. Many, many boys 
who have in them the making of fine farmers and success- 
ful men come to the city and take jobs from which they 
never can hope to rise. The girls have even less of a chance. 
They must often work for a mere pittance, away from 
friends and with much less opportunity of ever having a 
home of their own. The cities are crowded with poor law- 
yers, poor doctors, poor insurance men, and poor office 
men — men who could have done far better at some other 
calling. Of the most favored, it is doubtful if more than 
one out of ten ever amasses a competency for old age or 
ever rises above the average level of existence if misfortune 
spares him that long. 

A "stay-on-the-farm" movement is what we want — not 
so much a "back-to-the-farm" movement. We must strive 
to make country life so agreeable and interesting for them 
that the boys and girls will stay there until they reach the 
years of discretion, when there can be less doubt of a wise 
choice of life work. This, my friends, is to their interest, 
your interest and the nation's interest. And being a busi- 
ness man myself, one who has lived thirty years in a city 
of 50,000, I can say it without prejudice that one good 
farmer is Avorth more to Clay county and the state of 
Kansas than ten average men engaged in commercial or 
industrial occupations in the large city, for he will be 
more really successful and live a happier and more whole- 
some life. 

I believe the farm and country life hold a bright future 
for country-bred and country-trained boys and girls. In 
my opinion theirs is the brightest prospect facing any of 
the young people of the United States at this time. Farm- 
ing is about the only calling not overcroAvded. Our popu- 
lation already is growing faster than a million a year. The 
producer's services in future are to be appreciated and 



MAKE COUNTRY LIFE ATTRACTIVE 485 

rewarded more and more. There are plenty of signs to 
indicate this even now. The unfair handicaps which have 
so long held the farming industry down are, I believe, soon 
to be removed as a means of salvation to the whole people ; 
communication with the best and wholesomest cultural at- 
tractions of the cities and towns will become easier and 
easier of access to farm folks, and there is fair prospect 
that before many years the dwellers on western farms are 
going to be the most enviable people on earth. It is in the 
cities that the struggle for existence will grow keener and 
opportunities fewer. And so I urge my young friends in 
the country to stay on the farm for the better time that is 
coming. 

But we must in the meantime strive to make country 
life as attractive <'is possible to these young people. The 
boys and girls on the farm and in the small towns need, 
need so badly, the wholesome kind of social life, the diver- 
sity of new interests, as a relief from the monotony of 
rural life at an age when youth and youthful spirits re- 
quire safety valves. These aids are vital and necessary for 
their contentment in the growing, developing character- 
forming stage. 

I am glad the social center idea is taking hold in Kansas. 
Until comparatively recently, the schoolhouse in this coun- 
try has been used for but one purpose, that of housing the 
school. But I am thankful that the day is dawning in 
Kansas in which there will be no more locked and barred 
schoolhouse doors during vacation or at other times. 

You have in Atchison county a school plant which has 
cost millions of dollars. Here are valuable buildings wait- 
ing for use, for the enlightening of the people in the prob- 
lems which are facing us, in arousing men and boys and 
women to the highest efficiency in citizenship. 

I know today of many rural communities in Kansas 
where the schoolhouse is the true center of community life 
— a place for play and recreation, a place for discussion 
of vital questions of the day, where they have a concert 



486 STAY ON THE FARM 

and lecture hall, a meeting place for literary entertain- 
ments, festivals, institutes, moving picture shows, amateur 
theatricals, athletic exhibitions, baseball, basket ball and 
other games; to\\aiship contests for the display of farm 
products, a library and reading room, a place for mass 
meetings and civic clubs, and numerous other social gather- 
ings. 

It is a great problem still to be worked out — this stay- 
on -the-f arm idea. 

But give the farmer and his family economic justice and 
a square deal and the problem is solved. The bright lights 
and the *'Gay White Way" lure a few — ^many perhaps — 
to the city; the desire to wear a stiff collar and to keep 
the hands clean is the motive with some; the expectation 
of escaping hard work attracts a few foolish ones, but the 
majority of the people who leave the farm and go to the 
city do so because they believe that they can make more 
money in the city. They believe that there are bigger 
opportunities for them in the city. If we expect to keep 
them on the farm w'e must not only show them the oppor- 
tunities which already exist there, but we must see to it 
that the farm opportunities are in reality as great as those 
of the city; we must see to it that the big city has no mi- 
fair advantage or artificial advantage over the farmer. 



FARM WOMEN SHOULD HAVE MORE COMFORTS. 

From an Address at Wetmorc, Kan., District Fair, October 

2, 1915. 

The most severe indictment against tlie American farmer 
is that he often does not take time to give his family life's 
ordinary comforts. I believe men as a rule fail to realize 
the great demand made by home management and home 
cares on the time and strength of the unselfish mother and 



HOME CONVENIENCES NEEDED 487 

homemaker. Unselfish is the proper word, for there are 
none so unselfish as they are. They prove their devotion 
every day in the week. When a man comes home from his 
work he drops most of his cares and responsibilities at the 
threshold of his home, and it is well that he does. But 
"mother" seldom or never drops hers. She can't. She 
is ahvays on the job, always on call day or night. There 
is nothing truer in or out of the Bible, than the words of 
the familiar poem which declares — 

"Man works from sun to sun, 
But Avoman's work is never done." 

It is only when "mother" finally becomes ill or breaks 
down under the strain or monotony of her daily and 
nightly round of duties, that many of us are brought to 
a realization of the innumerable chores and the load of 
detail she has been carrying. Then it seems to the man 
of the house that he has struck bottom in the Slough of 
Despond, that nothing else matters much, and that noth- 
ing is quite so important as mother's restoration to health. 

I know nothing more chastening to the spirit of any man 
than such an experience as this. No man is ever quite so 
wretched or so helpless, whatever befalls him as he is under 
such circumstances as these. Therefore, I wish to make a 
plea on man's behalf, as well as woman's, for more step- 
saving and labor-saving conveniences in the home, more 
comfort and pleasure in life for "mother," and more op- 
portunities for wife and daughters to broaden their lives 
and enrich their minds. 

A woman in Bourbon county, who had broken down 
from overwork, had been carrying coal from the barn for 
years. When her husband was asked if there was any 
reason why a coal bunker could not have been provided 
near the cook stove and filled directly from the wagon, he 
answered that no one ever had thought of it. One of the 
most useful and helpful of these conveniences is having the 



488 MORE COMFORTS FOR WOMEN 

house piped for water. With water in the house and a few 
liairpins, it is said any Kansas woman can do anything. 
But I would not stop there. Every woman should have a 
cool screened porch in which to work during summer-time. 
And if the men folks are wise they will see that the kitchen 
and the home generally is the best equipped part of the 
farm. 

Life is too short to wear it away in drudgery. Improve- 
ments in home and home living not only conserve the 
health and happiness of mother, but the health and general 
well-being of the whole family. No money is saved by not 
having them, by paying out instead, as much if not more 
money than they would cost, in doctor's bills or for a 
funeral . 

I believe the farmers of Kansas live better than the 
farmers of many other states, but I should like to see them 
live better still. We have not reached the limit of sane 
and sensible home improvement by any means — the kind 
we cannot afford to do without. Men and women who 
work hard with hand or brain, or with both, must biilance 
this labor with rest, comfort and recreation if they would 
continue and would keep young and vigorous. Anything 
which is an aid to the happiness and well-being of family, 
whose interests all center in mother, is an investment that 
not only pays large dividends financially, but is a fine aid 
to the contentment and progress of the young folks and a 
safeguard against losses and failure. They make us fit, 
and when as a man or Avoman we are fit, we can always 
do our best work and find real happiness in the doing. 



THE FARMERS' TREMENDOUS RESPONSIBILITY. 

From an Address at the Wichita Wheat Congress, October 

12, 1915. 

Personally and officially I am "very strong," as we say 
in the Kansas language, for agricultural and livestock ex- 
hibitions. I find this, the first big wheat show ever held, 
a wonderfully interesting and educational exhibit, a credit 
to the initiative and enterprise of Wichita and Kansas. 

There is only one appropriate place in all the world for 
an international wheat show and that is next to the world 's 
bread basket and the world's flour barrel. We have both 
the basket and the barrel in Kansas. Kansas is the world's 
greatest producer of high quality wheat. Step outside of 
the door, almost anywhere in Kansas, and you will be 
within seeing distance of the basket or the barrel, or both 
basket and barrel. 

Wichita is right in the middle of the basket and is doing 
right to make that big- fact known to the world — a world 
just now most vitally interested in knowing where its bread 
is to come from, notwithstanding this is a big wheat year 
in nearly all wheat-producing countries. 

It may be true that the Northwestern mills grind a little 
more flour than we do, but they do it by grinding Kansas 
wheat. 

It seems to me the consumer cannot expect any decided 
recession of prices as long as the war lasts. On the farm 
and in the factory we must continue to be the busiest peo- 
ple in the world. During the first year of the war approxi- 
mately 370 million bushels of wheat 'were shipped to Eu- 
rope — much more than a million bushels a day. For one, 
two or three years, more than 374 million people, repre- 

489 



490 THE FARMER'S RESPONSIBILITY 

seuting the population of the countries at war, must look 
to us for nearly all the necessities of life, not simply dur- 
ing the Avar, but during several years of reconstruction 
after peace is declared; before the ruin of European agri- 
culture can be restored and its farm population again re- 
cruited ; before its mills and factories can again be set go- 
ing. The resources of the United States as a producing na- 
tion are to be tested as they never have been tested before. 

We shall be busy on the farm, busy in the factory, busier 
than we ever have been. 

All this is fine, for it is fine to help a war-stricken world. 

We are doing so well in Kansas compared to all the rest 
of the world that I fear the danger of going slack, a dan- 
ger always attendant on prosperity. 

It is the contented, well-fed, comfortable citizen who 
goes stale. 

It is the prosperous, smoothly running business that 
first slows up and then slows down. 

Human nature is so constituted that it seems to get far- 
ther with a fighting chance tlian it does with a golden 
opportunity. 

AVe have come up thru hardships and adversity and 
are doing well in Kansas, but at tlie same time we are com- 
ing face to face with much the s^ime world-old problems 
whicli have wrecked empires, vanquished nations, erased 
peoples. 

I am not pessimistic about it, only deeply concerned and 
wishing every Kansan to realize to the utmost, tlie almost 
staggering responsibility that rests upon him, whether he 
thinks it does, or does not. I know every man and every 
woman present, has thought of some of these puzzling 
questions, perhaps all of them. It is well to discuss them, 
to consider them frequently at public gatherings. 

Our standards are so wholesome in Kansas. We have 
labored so wiselv and so well. Kansas is still so young, 



CO-OPERATION AND GOOD WILL 491 

strong-, clean and virile, that it seems inevitable that the 
nation must look to us and not in vain, for a way out of 
many great difficulties. 

We have done so well we must do far better. We must 
go on as we have begun, vigorously and persistently right- 
ing our errors, grappling with our difficulties, lining up, 
man to man and woman to woman, for the best in govern- 
ment, for the best in agriculture, for the best in education, 
in home life, in living ; for fair play and a square deal for 
men and measures, in a high and loyal spirit of co-opera- 
tion and good will. 

As a people we are too generally intelligent, too generally 
forward-looking and enterprising, it seems to me, to fail 
in this great, big, fundamental purpose of life. 



EVIL OF TENANCY AND THE SHORT LEASE. 

From (1)1 Addfess''(tt the Wichita Wheat Congress, October 

12, 1915. 

The more we do to emphasize, foster and develop our 
agricultural industry, the better for us and for our coun- 
try. In history it is plainly written, over and over again, 
that God has wiped out whole civilizations and put the 
blight of decay and dissolution on great cities, simply to 
start a back-to-the-land movement. 

What we must work for in Kansas is a stay-on-the-land 
movement. It should be our effort to make it decidedly 
worth while to stay on the land. 

Some of the big things we haven't done in Kansas and 
must do, include longer leases, more general co-operation, 
more equitable terms between land owners and tenant 
farmers. How else are we going to maintain the workers 



492 THE EVILS OF SHORT LEASES 

in our biggest industry, make first-class, liome-owning, tax- 
paying citizens of them and have No. 1 farmers on our 
farms ? 

Farm tenancy and the short lease is spreading like the 
measles in Kansas. It is a much more serious and tenacious 
disease. It is destructive of soil, sinew and manhood, of 
landowners and landworkers. It will get us all if we don't 
get it. 

I don't mean to be an alarmist, I am not alarmed, nor 
are you, I hope, but I am trying to state the matter as 
strongly as its importance warrants. 

We have plenty of land in Kansas and we must make 
it more easih^ possible for the young men, and the men of 
small means, to become home-owners. 

The one-year lease is not now a home-maker and prob- 
ably never will be again. Let us have leases that build up 
the land, build up the man on the land, build up the land- 
owner, the community and the state. Let's have leases 
that make good farming and good farmers possible. When 
we have done that, and perfected and extended an ade- 
quate and a fairly elastic system of rural credit, the ten- 
ancy problem will be in a fair way to take care of itself, 
along with seveTral other serious difficulties. 

Closely allied to this difficulty is the development and 
extension of our rural credit system, now in an uncertain 
and feeble infancy. We need farm credit for the tenant 
farmer even more than for the landowner. 

Tied up with this is rural community organization, co- 
operative marketing, a really effective system of distribu- 
tion which shall couple demand with supply and eliminate 
the greatest source of waste in the economy of the Amer- 
ican nation. 

Good roads come in here. We are talking big. but doing 
little. We haven't really got them. We are, if anytliing, 
a little behind other nearby states in this particular. We 



KANSAS IS MAKING PROGRESS 493 

are losing vastly more of actual benefit and cash than we 
have any idea we are losing and in ways many of us still 
are blind to. 

Yet far more important than all these — tho vitally 
affected by each of them — the solution of all and the only 
solution, first, last, final, dependable — is education, espe- 
cially rural education; and more comfort, well-being and 
happiness; and less irksome and exhausting drudgery in 
the farm home. 

We are making fine progress here. Yet we have barely 
started. The future of Kansas is in the making, right 
now, in the tiny little schoolhouses which dot the map of 
Kansas like the holes in a sieve. 



INCREASING FOOD PRODUCTION. 

From an Address at the Agricultural Conference at To- 
peka, Kan., March 15, 1917. 

This conference has not been called with the idea of 
solving the problem presented by the high cost of living. 
The farmers of Kansas are not responsible for that; the 
blame for "food riots" does not lie at the farmers' door. 
Economists are pretty well agreed, I think, that the influx 
of gold in the last two years, must inevitably result in a 
rise of prices. There is the first explanation of the in- 
creasing difficulty which our urban population encounters 
in keeping body and soul together. But over and above 
that, there exists in the minds of the people a well-defined 
suspicion that the manipulation of unscrupulous specula- 
tors is a most important factor in producing the greatlj' 
complained of cost of foodstuffs. Despite the protests of 
commission men and jobbers, the facts will not down ; the 
doubling and trebling and quadrupling of the prices of 
many commodities after they reach the distributing market 



494 INCREASING FOOD PRODUCTION 

point unmistakably to manipulation of a sort that must be 
stopped in the interest of both the produem- and the con- 
sumer. 

The freight congestion is, of course, another factor that 
has contributed to the shortage of available supplies in 
the centers of population. This is not because of any un- 
willingness on the pai't of the railroads to haul foodstuffs, 
but because ujitil our recent embargo upon foreign ship- 
ments, the railroads were busy to the limit of their capacity 
in moving freight to seaport points destined to foreign 
ports. The freight for export is on the whole more profit- 
able to haul than that for domestic use, because the food- 
stuffs take a relatively low freight rate. Also the long 
haul is more profitable than is freight destined to local 
points. This is the reason why such a point as DeKalb, 
Illinois, for example, in the very heart of an agricultural 
region, suffers from a flour shortage altho we have plenty 
of flour in Kans is. Speculators have found this freight 
congestion to their advantage in manipulating prices as the 
shortage in one place could not be met quickly, as it can 
in times when the freight situation is normal. 

But taking all that into consideration the fact remains 
that the world's supply of foodstuffs is below normal. 
IMore than 25 million men have been withdrawn from 
productive pursuits and put under arms. But they keep 
right on consuming — perhaps on the whole in larger quan- 
tities than when engaged in their ordinary occupations. 
Other thousands of men have been withdrawn from their 
usual pursuits to supply the armies of Europe with muni- 
tions. It is impossible that this drain upon the industries 
of the world could fail to decrease production, no matter 
how great the effort of the nations at war to make up the 
deficiency. 

I agree with Secretary Houston that there is no immedi- 
ate cause for hysteria or panic. We are not going to starve 
to death this winter and there is no immediate need of food 
dictatorship. Our farmers will not be cajoled nor brow- 



MUST PRODUCE MORE FOOD 495 

beaten into embarking upon unprofitable ventures in order 
to provide the manipulators of markets with the means of 
gambling; they Avill rightly insist that some of the evils of 
marketing and distribution be corrected while they en- 
deavor to increase their production, so that neither pro- 
ducer nor consumer be left at the mercy of unrestricted 
greed. 

I have every confidence in the public spirit of Kansas — 
as well as in the business sense of her producers. I have 
not called this meeting for the purpose of pointing out to 
our farmers their duty. But I am thoroly convinced that, 
business foresight counsels a speeding-up of production; 
the world needs every pound of foodstuffs that we can 
produce, and the world is ready to pay for it ; so, patriot- 
ism aside, business sense says "Produce it!" 



THE EVIL OF FARM TENANCY. 

From an Address at the Ottawa Fair, September 18, 1918. 

As I see it, the most important economic problem we 
have in this country today is land owning and tenant farm- 
ing. Most of our farmers now are tenant farmers, and the 
number is constantly increasing. This is not conducive 
to solving that other problem — how to keep the boys on 
the farm, nor how to get those boys back to the land who 
u^ent years ago to the cities and now wish they could re- 
turn. We must make it possible for tenant farmers to 
become farm owners, or make it possible and profitable for 
them to farm right — the way they would like to farm and 
would farm if they did not have to work the land for all it 
is worth to get anything for their labor. 

I find mighty few satisfied tenants and landholders. Let 
me cite the case of one man, a good farmer who rents his 



496 THE EVIL OF FARM TENANCY 

land to a tenant : His crops are growing a little lighter 
each year. His income, as well as the tenant's, is growing 
less. He tries to get better terms out of the tenant, the 
tenant tries to get better terms out of him ; no improve- 
ments are made, the soil grows a little poorer every year, 
and matters are going from bad to worse. 

Under the present system it is nearly, if not quite im- 
possible, for the land owner and the tenant to do better by 
each other. No tenant can afford to build up another 
man 's run-down farm, and the high price of land is making 
it more and more difficult for a tenant to buy a farm of 
his own. The Farm Credits Law can't help him. It aids 
the men who have land. And if this law made it possible 
for even a fraction of all farm tenants to buy farms, there 
would simply be another big rise in the price of land. 

If we go on in the old way many more years, there will 
be worse and more of it ahead. I think we are all beginning 
to see this and to look for the way out. First, we must 
stop the big land speculator who is holding large tracts for 
a higher price — a higher price earned for him by the labor 
of others. We must adjust the big land speculator's taxes 
so he must sell or farm his large tracts. When this is done, 
he will cut these big holdings up into farms and sell the 
farms. Tenancy will pass away. With it will go the dan- 
ger of a land-holding aristocracy. 

I am glad to see that more and more of our farmers, as 
well as the farmers of other states, are coming to this way 
of thinking ; also the best and most trustworthy farm jour- 
nals and the big organizations of farmers. For if we don't 
make the farming industry safely and generously profit- 
able, we shall go down and out as a nation, and I can't 
believe any such thing as that is going to happen to the 
people of the United States of America. In my opinion 
the farmi)ig industry — critical as is its present situation — 
never has liad so bright a future before it. 



CO-OPERATION THE FARMER'S GREAT NEED. 

From an Address at Reading Farmers Picnic, Lyon County, 
September 10, 1915. 

Co-operation and organization are the watchwords of 
American advancement and Kansas farmers must come to 
it. Jhe farmer buys of organized trusts and sells to or- 
ganized middlemen. How can he hold his own if he is 
unorganized? Organized as effectively as the American 
Federation of Labor, the farmers of the United States 
could dictate the price of foodstuffs and, if so disposed, 
force the enactment of laws that would for a time place 
them in affluence and cause hardship to nearly every other 
class of people. We do not want that. But Kansas coun- 
try people should realize that "In union there is strength" 
and should get together for mutual benefit. Every city 
has its commercial club, every village its improvement as- 
sociation. Is the man who farms, whose investment totals 
many thousands of dollars and whose operations sometimes 
run into tens of thousands, less a business man than the 
man who sells a few dollars worth of goods over a counter 
every year? Community organization and co-operation 
among country people not only means more dollars, but a 
broader and better social life, and an education at home 
for your children. 

And I believe this leaven is working. Wherever one goes 
today ; all over Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and other west- 
ern states, I find the men and women and the children are 
talking of clubs and associations, the end and the aim of 
which are to make life larger and more wholesome. The 
forces of the countryside are gathering for a great forward 

497 



498 CO-OPERATION FOR FARMERS 

movement. There is everywhex-e a note of comradeship 
that stirs one as the blast of a trumpet. 

So I say the fundamental task of rural advance is local 
rural community building — the gradual erection of stronger 
communities, founded on better farm practice, securing a 
fair profit thru better farm business methods, and growing 
mightily ambitious for a better farm life. 

How can this fundamental rural task be forwarded in 
Kansas in 1915 and 1916? 

First, organize local community campaigns in as many 
neighborhoods as possible. Seek the formation of a com- 
munity council or federation, made up of representatives 
of all the organizations in the neighborhoods that have any 
interest in the common good — the farmers' union, the 
grange, the church, the women's club, and so on. Endeavor 
to make an intelligent plan for improving the community 
in all needful respects. Let the schoolhouse become the 
community center. 

It is such men as you who are most deeply interested in 
every move for civic righteousness and good government 
in the state of Kansas — men who go ahead without regard 
to tlie applause or the abuse of the crowd — men who have 
the breadth of vision to see the right and the moral cour- 
age to do the right, tho the heavens fall — upon whom 
Ave must depend for the solution of the many pressing 
problems peculiar to these times. 

There is no question but that the farmers of Kansas, 
coustituting almost 60 per cent of its population and hav- 
ing two-thirds of its taxable wealth, should have a vital 
influence upon the legislation of the state. The farmers 
are the source of the most influential political opinion and 
influence in Kansas, and are certain to become more in- 
fluential. But they are not at this time exercising the 
influence upon legislation whicli their number entitles tliem 
to exert. 

The professional politicians, usually not farmers, are not 
numerous as compared with tlie gr.eat number of farmers 



BETTER ORGANIZATION NEEDED 499 

in this state, yet their influence, tho not so great as 
forniorly, is still very large, simply because they stand 
together; they are organized, they know what they want, 
and they have a pretty good idea how to get it, and you 
have noticed that they are not "backward about going 
forward" when it comes to asking for what they want. 
Tho relatively not numerous, they have thought in the 
past and many of them now think that they should have 
everything to say in the matter of selecting candidates for 
office. That thru these candidates they should control 
the course of much legislation. 

Lawyers, too, are not over modest ; they think they are 
especially qualified to make our laws. And for the most 
part in this country we have taken them at their word, for 
we have been ruled as no other nation in history ever was 
ruled, bj^ lawyers. We need lawyers in our law-making 
bodies, but in my judgment, lawyers in our halls of legis- 
lation, state and national, have had representation far be- 
yond that to which their number entitles them. The bank- 
ers, the railroad men, the newspaper publishers themselves, 
tho small in number as compared with tlie farmers, and 
owning nothing like the wealth which the farmers of this 
state own, have been relatively more successful in "getting 
what they wanted," because better organized and more 
insistent upon getting what they consider their rights. I 
am not criticising any of these special business interests 
for attempting, when they do it legitimately, to influence 
legislation. I am criticising the farmer for his too common 
policy of not asking effectively for what he should have, 
and then sometimes complaining because he doesn't get it. 

Now that the primary is a settled fact in Kansas, farm- 
ers can "get to" their law-makers more effectively than 
ever before. This is one method available to the farmers 
of Kansas for the effective expression of their will. 

Another method is by organization, by co-operation. Co- 
operation in countries like England and Denmark has en- 
abled consumers to deal directly with the producers or with 



500 CO-OPERATION FOR FARMERS 

one or two larger middlemen. Thus the consumers' dollar 
is divided among fewer people and the farmer gets more 
of it. I think we must sooner or later follow along a sim- 
ilar line in this country. 

A number of farmers went to Chicago several months 
ago to investigate this situation. They found that some of 
the food products they were growing had passed thru 
six hands before they reached the ultimate consumer. Now 
1 suppose that no one of the middlemen took too large a 
profit, but it requires no argument at all to prove that this 
system of doing business is wholly wrong and must event- 
ually be disastrous. It means that our system of distribu- 
tion in this country must be reorganized. It is asserted 
that there are more people in the United States who are 
non-producers than in any other nation on the globe. This 
situation inevitably leads to increased cost of living. Any 
10-year-old child can see that. 

AVhen the farmers of America become really in earnest 
about co-operation and organization as they are in Den- 
mark and England, they will have the active assistance of 
all the daily and weekly newspapers. These newspapers 
will then give them all the aid and all the publicity possible. 
Tho myself a newspaper man, proud of my profession, 
I confess that the newspapers of the country, especially 
in our larger cities, often have represented interests and 
points of view as far as possible from those of the farmer. 
If our farmers, representing over 40 millions of our popu- 
lation, were organized as they are in Denmark, our metro- 
politan papers, our legislatures and Congress would be 
compelled to t;ike notice of them and their interests, con- 
tinually. The farmers can get these things done in Kansas, 
or in the nation at large when they are really in earnest. 
And they can have the earnest and effective support of 
the newspapers of the country, most of them, whenever 
they demand it. 

All that you farmers of Kansas want, as I understand 
it, is evenhanded justice ; an absolutely square deal for 



A VICTORY FOE PACKERS 501 

.every man, woman and child within the borders of this 
state, and on that proposition I stand witli you, heart and 
soul. 



PACKER CONTROL OB^ LIVESTOCK MARKETS. 

From an Address to the Farmers' Union, Topeka, Kan., 
Fehruary 2, 1916. 

We are up against several problems in this country. One 
of them we have had with us for a long time : I know and 
you know that there is something wrong with our livestock 
markets. I know and you know that that something is do- 
ing more to hold back our progress toward better farming 
than probably any other ojie thing. 

When in two days last fall the price of hogs declined 
$1.25 a hundred, it was plain some powerful interest was 
unlawfully and wickedly manipulating the market. Ex- 
cept in times of panic, the law of supply and demand 
doesn't take a landslide jump like this. It works much 
more slowly and naturally. Usually it gives warnings of 
changes to come, long in advance. It was about time for 
"the packers' fall raid," as it has come to be called, and 
the squeeze went on suddenly with a thump. 

Producers, after they got their bearings, held off for a 
while. They could see nothing to justify a slump like that. 
They couldn't believe it would last. Prices dropped lower 
— then lower. Little by little the market receipts gained- 
momentum, as the farmers decided it was better to cash-in 
for what they could get than to hold on in the face of the 
higher prices of corn and its actual scarcity in several of 
the corn states. Then, finally, the usual thing happened, 
there was a scramble to market hogs, the market records 
were broken by the rush. The producers were the losers. 

It was a great victory — for the packers. And maybe 



502 PACKER CONTROL OF MARKETS 

they needed the money — Great Britain had held up 15 or, 
16 million dollars worth of their beef — but need of money 
is not a license to go out in the road and take it away from 
all comers. 

So far as I can see this is just what the packers did, and 
[ am not lonesome in that opinion. 

We know, virtually, that the packers control all stock- 
yards and their terminal facilities ; even banks and loan 
companies. We know tliat in various ways they discipline 
the producer who shows a little independence. We know 
the packers have repeatedly been fined for overstepping 
the laws intended to regulate big business — laws intended 
to keep big business from eating up little business. 

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the 
livestock markets are systematically controlled by factors 
other than supply and demand. When the profit in feed- 
ing stecj'S is so painfully absent, as it has been in the last 
year ; when we have raids on the hog market as Ave had 
last fall, it is as plain as the nose on a man's face that 
there arc abnormal forces controlling the price of farm 
products; that some powerful interest is illegally manipu- 
lating the market, and I believe that powerful interest to 
be tlie big packing houses. 

The fact which the farmers of Kansas must face is this: 
The markets of the United States are organized, no doubt 
with headquarters at Chicago. Of its kind this is one of 
the best organizations the United States ever has seen, the 
$1.25 drop was an excellent illustration of its team-work 
efficiency. But it is so grave and so serious a menace to 
the progress of the West that something must be done. 
And I think something will be done, but the producers must 
not leave it solely to the state and the government. They 
themselves have a remedy — organization and co-operation 
— possibly the establishment of public abattoirs and cold 
storage plants will come where the producers can slaughter 



MUST REGULATE PRICES 503 

their own cattle and sheep and hogs and sell them on the 
block instead of the hoof. 

I am glad to bring you the information that the federal 
department of justice has just entered upon an investiga- 
tion of livestock prices at the central markets. Only re- 
cently I received a letter from the United States District 
Attorney asking for the co-operation of the state of Kansas. 
He will get it. I told him we would help him in every pos- 
sible way to get at the bottom of this infamous combine of 
the packers. I have directed Mr. Mercer, the head of our 
state livestock department, one of the best men in Kansas 
for this work, to give federal officials every possible help, 
and he will have all the backing and assistance from the 
governor that he needs. 

I hope for definite, tangible results from this investiga- 
tion. It has more steam behind it from the producing end. 
I think we are going to get somewhere, and I want you to 
know that all the power of the state of Kansas and the 
strength of the governor will be used to help the work 
along. 

If the market is being controlled, as it obviously is, there 
are laws which will reach it. We are going to have a full 
and complete investigation. If the packers are in the 
wrong the time is coming when they will go to prison or 
mend their ways. 

It is evident the livestock industry of Kansas never can 
grow to capacity until the marketing system is improved. 
I think if the federal officials will enforce the laws we 
already have, the sale of livestock thru ordinary chan- 
nels will be much more steady and profitable to the pro- 
ducers. In addition to this, the effort must be made to 
provide competition in other ways. Why, for example, 
should there not be a considerable development in this 
country of co-operative packing plants?. We are making 
rapid progress in Kansas in co-operative efforts; the grain 
elevators, the Farmers Union, the Grange and many other 
forms of co-operative effort are showing surprisingly sue- 



504 PACKER CONTROL OF MARKETS 

cessful growth. The people of the state are getting used 
to co-operation—they are seeing that it is profitable and 
right, tliat it is doing a great deal to develop our greatest 
industry and that, as we all know, is farming. I believe we 
have learned to work together well enough in Kansas and 
the West so that we can take up other forms of co-opera- 
tive effort, and especially co-operative packing plants. 

If, after a careful study this is not considered feasible, 
perhaps municipal owned packing plants enabling the pro- 
ducers to market their stuff dressed instead of on the hoof, 
might afford the necessary competition to insure right 
prices. 

Tliis has been the way that the movement has gone for- 
ward in other nations, where the co-operative idea has 
been developed further than in this country. In Denmark, 
which is leading the world in co-operative effort, 60, or 
about two-thirds of the ])acking plants of the country, are 
owned in co-operation, mostly by farmers, and they have 
95,000 shareholders. This system eliminates six of the 
eleven profits that are made under our present plan after 
the stock leaves the producer and before it reaches the con- 
sumer. These profits are the shipper's profit, freight to 
market, terminal or switching charge, yardage, feed, com- 
mission, a ])acker's profit, a salesman's salary and ex- 
penses, freight to the retail market, drayage and a butch- 
er's profit. The meat from these plants in Denmark has 
set the standard in tlio markets of Europe, and the pro- 
ducers are getting all that the product brings from the 
consumer, less the actual cost of manufacturing, selling and 
transportation. 

All that Kansas farmers are asking, as I understand it, 
is a square deal ; that the market shall be controlled by the 
old law of supply and demand. No men have a better right 
to a square deal and I am with them body and soul in that 
demand. It is the basis of all business life. If the market 
conditions can be placed on a satisfactory basis the live- 



THE FUTURE OF FARMING 505 

stock business will make a big growth in the next five 
years. Nothing better could happen to Kansas. I want 
you to know you can count on me at every turn of the road 
in this or any other matter that will help you get what 
honestly belongs to you. 



PRISON OR BIG STICK FOR PACKERS. 

From an Address to the Farmers' Union, Smith Center, 
February 4, 1918. 

Next to the war, I am more concerned about the future 
of the farming industry than about anything else. The 
war being right on our backs we have got of course to deal 
with that first, but also we must be looking ahead to our 
economic future, the mightiest of all our problems. 

Farming is our oldest big business. It is our biggest big 
business. It is our most important big business. But in- 
stead of being our strongest, most thriving industry, it is 
our weakest. It attracts much less attention than any 
other, makes much less noise than any other and gets less 
really helpful legislation than any other. Also it seems 
to have no economic rights that any other business, big or 
little, is bound to respect. 

You have had plenty of proof of all this during the last 
year. And of course you know tlie answer. Farmers do 
not yet club together, nor work together, nor get together 
i:s men do in the other industries and professions. But 
you are beginning to do this and that is one of the most 
hopeful signs these dark days — for a nation without a pros- 
pering and progressive farm population is a sick nation — 
sick unto death. 

And our farm industry is sick, very sick. For a genera- 
tion a disease almost as ruinous as drouth and grasshop- 
pers has fastened itself on tlie farming industry. Years 



506 BIG STICK FOR PACKERS 

ago, like a gigantic cattle tick, a completely organized, 
predatory and lawless monopoly attached itself to the 
West's livestock industry and has bled it nnmercifully ever 
since. But it begins to look as if we might shake it off. 
Before th^ Federal Trades Commission gets thru with its 
job at Chicago there will be no brand of whitewash, legal 
or legislative, that will stick to the packers. 

We have got to shake off this bloodsucker, or reform it, 
if we are going to get anywhere in agriculture. We never 
had sound banks and reliable banking until we sent dis- 
honest bankers to prison. We never shall have a square 
deal for the livestock farmer, nor an honest livestock mar- 
ket, until we send dishonest packers to the penitentiary, 
and I believe we are getting ready to do just that. 

A warning that "nothing could stop criminal prosecu- 
tions," was put in writing and submitted to the packers 
by their own legal staff of smart lawyers in 1916, when 
the present proceedings were threatened. These men, keen 
judges of law and of evidence, and fully informed of the 
methods of the packers, notified them in polite but un- 
mistakable language, that a criminal trial, conviction and 
prison sentence probably awaited them if caught — as they 
have been caught — with the goods. 

This virtually is a confession of guilt, an admission that 
a prison sentence was justifiable and inevitable under the 
law. 

The packers pulled every wire and used every instru- 
ment at their command to head off this investigation — 
and failed ! 

Do you get the mighty significance of that failure? 
There are men still in this world who cannot be bought. 
Yes, there are. They are increasing instead of decreasing. 
Also it is our American habit to submit to an evil until it 
seems it actually has mastered us, then to turn on it sud- 
denly and exterminate it root and branch. 

It seems to me we have now reached this turning point 
with the packers. There can be no fines this time for the 



A DRASTIC REMEDY DEMANDED 507 

packers to collect from the public thru lower prices wrung 
from the producer and higher prices extorted from the con- 
sumer. There can be no whitewashing, no miscarriage of 
justice. The law must take its inevitable course this time 
as it always does with the little malefactor, and that course 
can be none other than a prison sentence. 

We never have been in such great need of an act of 
simple justice in high pi ;ces. We never have needed so 
enipiiatic t-n example and an object lesson as this would 
be. A packer sent to prison for his misdeeds would be 
serving emphatic and unmistakable notice on all grafters, 
big and little, tliat their turn was coming. It would be 
the greatest, the wholesomest, the most telling and power- 
ful argument that predatory greed and profiteering shall 
cease, and that is the reason why I believe it is coming. 

A remedy must be sought which will control the greed 
of these men, either by administering these plants as pub- 
lic utilities and placing the packers and their terminals 
under direct public regulation, or by a system of municipal 
or state packing plants, or by establishing local or com- 
munity meat packing plants operated on the co-operative 
plan. As the last two means must of necessity be a de- 
velopment of slow growth, it may be sufficient for the time 
to take charge of the meat packing industry as provided 
for in the Food Act and work out the manner of its future 
administration after the war. 

But we are done with fining. It now must be prison 
or the big stick. 

We know, virtually, that the packers control all stock- 
yards and their terminal facilities ; even many banks and 
loan companies. We know that in various ways they dis- 
cipline the producer who shows a little independence. We 
know the packers have repeatedly been fined for over- 
stepping the laws intended to regulate big business^laws 
intended to keep big business from eating up little business. 



NO DANGER OF PROFITEERING IN FARMING. 

From an Address at Alma Fair, Ocioher 20, 1917. 

I don't believe there is any great danger of farming ever 
getting in the profiteer class. Before many years I think 
profiteering will be pnt out of business entirely. I hope 
that time will come soon. But I do believe that every 
thinking man wishes the man on the farm, and the farm 
industry, to thrive and prosper. That it has not had a 
square deal and is not getting one now, is mainly because 
in the game of grab that is going on, it has been unable to 
assert its rights, or to have them asserted for it, and the 
greedj^ fellows are taking advantage of it as they always 
have done. 

Just now, how to support his family and save his coun- 
try, is the man-sized job nearly every Kansas farmer has 
in front of him, and the profiteers are largely to blame for 
it. The general public doesn't yet knoAV, nor understand, 
what a heroic fight is being made on Kansas soil. Not- 
withstanding 2 acres out of every 3 failed to produce a 
crop at our last harvest, leaving our wheat raisers with 6 
million unproductive acres, they have gone ahead and 
planted a w^ar crop of 10 million acres, in a year so disas- 
trous to them that Kansas fell from sixth place in the 
ranks of big crop-producing states to fourteenth place. No 
such slump in our relative standing ever has occurred be- 
fore. Then the price fixed for Avheat in many instances, 
took away the last chance many of our grain farmers had 
for "breaking even." Some of them even had to borrow 
money to buy seed for the new crop. Despite these great 
obstacles, despite the labor shortage and the large number 
of Kansas boys who have gone from the farm into the army 

50S 



NO FAVORS SHOWN PRODUCERS 509 

or the navy, the farmers of Kansas somehow have man- 
aged to put in a record-breaking acreage, notwithstanding. 
I don't know any finer example of Kansas pluck. The 
nation has had no finer demonstration of patriotism by 
any state or industry since the war began. 

I hope, somehow, we shall pull thru. But if it were not 
for the profiteering from which our farmers are suffering 
greatly, in spite of the regulating that has been done higher 
up, we should have a fairer chance to pull thru, notwith- 
standing the complication of our farm labor shortage and 
the extremely unfavo]*able condition of the growing crop 
up to this time. 

In its price-fixing higher up, the government apparently 
has been too largely influenced by the interests it has at- 
tempted to regulate instead of dominating them. It in- 
vited them in, virtually to make their own terms. The one 
exception was the farm industry, w^hich in the opinion of 
few farmers was really or a.dequately represent-ed. The 
coal operators, to use the words of Emerson Carey, state 
fuel administrator for Kansas, "are bigger than the Fuel 
Administration." The fact is that the word of this and 
that interest has been taken in the fixing of prices, and 
their representatives have been put on boards appointed 
to administer price regulations. I fear we haven't much 
cause to expect relief from them. The packers, who sold 
"embalmed beef" to the government during the Spanish- 
American war, are today compelling Uncle Sam, and the 
men who are going to the trenches to fight for them, to 
pay from two to four prices for leather goods and foot- 
wear. The packers will be allowed to make 9 per cent 
profit on meat products,- which they have always declared 
they produced at a loss, and 15 per cent on the rest of 
their products. 

We cannot expect much relief from greedy combinations 
which never have shown they had a conscience nor a par- 
ticle of integrity in regard to obedience to law. We can- 
not expect big business to do other than take the best care 



510 NO PROFITEERING BY FARMERS 

of itself, nor to be very fierce with any of the jobbers and 
its other customers whom it catches profiteering. 

And when it comes to the profiteering evil, the govern- 
ment, apparently, thinks only of the cities. I have sent 
many letters to Washington to show that it is even a more 
serious and far-reaching evil in the country. An effort 
has been made to regulate the price of mill fee 1. It h '.s 
been regulated between the mill and the handlers of the 
product, but the stock feeders are receiving the benefit in 
so few instances that many have had to quit and there has 
been a landslide of half-fat stock "Sent to market, which 
later on, if not now, we shall need woefully. 

If you don 't pull Uncle Sam out of the hole, I don 't know 
who will pull him out. He seems well convinced of that 
himself. But so far, while our farmers are facing a short- 
age of labor, a scarcity of good seed, high interest charges, 
high prices for feed and seed, the lowest condition for 
winter wheat we have ever had at this time of year — and 
the loss to the ranks of better paid labor in the cities, of 
as many trained farmers and farm hands as we have sent 
to the army and navy — Uncle Sara has signally failed to 
give us the same degree of protection he has given the great 
profit-producing organizations. The packers get their 9 
to 15 per cent, the railroads their regular dividends, the 
immensely wealthy steel trust has a generous margin of 
profit, the millers are Avell taken care of and the coal 
barons are charging higher prices than hist year. But it 
is up to the farmer and stock raiser to take care of him- 
self as best he may, foregoing his own profit, but paying 
profiteer rates to all others while doing his utmost to stand 
loyally by Uncle S nn in this deiith-grapple. 

I don't believe it was intended to put farmers in the 
hole in this way. I don't think we should hold Uncle Sam 
too strictly to account in this time of great extremity for 
his apparent discrimination, but I cannot help thinking 
if the producers had been called in for consultation as 
freely as were millers, wholesnlers and the representatives 



THE KANSAS ATTITUDE 511 

of various branches of big business, we should not now be 
so terribly hampered on all sides, and thousands of half- 
fat cattle would not have been shipped to market when 
every source of human food should be developed to the 
maximum. The Kansas City cittle market in recent weeks 
has been swamped at times by the heavy receipts of this 
class of stock. Even dairy herds have gone to the block. 

AVe are now supposed to be straining every nerve at con- 
servation, but a conservation policy which does not con- 
serve, promote, and protect the thrift and progress of the 
American farming industry — the source of all our strength 
and vigor as a nation — is a mighty short-sighted policy. 

These then are our difficulties, just now. No people 
ever have faced a situation with better spirit or with 
greater courage. That is the Kansas attitude of mind. 
Let us do the very best we can to maintain our fighting 
edge, for I am convinced there is a better time coming for 
the American farmer in which he and his calling will be 
fittingly recognized and the greatest American industry 
of all be given a square deal, and this, my friends, is all 
it ever has needed. 



NOT FOOD EMBARGO BUT SUPPRESSION OF FOOD 
TRUST NEEDED. 

From an Address to Stockmen at Arkansas City, January 

23, 1917. 

It is not a difficult matter to figure out a serious food 
shortage in this, or any other country — when the specula- 
tors do the figuring. Knowing this to be true, and having 
a fairly dependable knowledge of this nation's industrial 
history, I must confess that the recent talk of a food em- 
bargo does not find me a patient listener. Nor does such 



512 SUPPRESS THE FOOD TRUSTS 

talk alarm me. I do not for a moment believe the present 
national administration would add another to its already 
formidable list of blunders, and legislation of that kind 
most certainly would come under precisely that head. It 
v.'ould create country-wide resentment which President 
Wilson, you may be sure, does not desire to stir up right 
now, or during his term of office. 

The really important part of the food situation, the part 
that ought to have the immediate and vigorous attention 
of the Department of Justice, is more in legislation look- 
ing to food control in the interest of the people — not in a 
supposed food shortage. One does not have to go beyond 
the reports of the Department of Agriculture itself to find 
the reason for the exorbitant prices demanded for the 
staples of life. The reason will not be found on the farms. 
It will not be apparent in the farmers' bank accounts, nor 
in the sales of motor cars or other conveniences the farm- 
ers are buying. It will be found in the store houses owned 
or controlled by several hundred firms of speculators whose 
holdings have lately been investigated by the Department 
of Agriculture. These reports are now public property, 
as the food ought to be. 

When the government of Germany or some other war- 
torn country arbitrarily takes control of food supplies, 
Americans are very likely to declare that such rule never 
would be tolerated in a free country. And this is exactly 
what is wrong in America today : In many respects we 
have too much freedom. A certain class is prone to mis- 
take freedom, liberty of "ction, for license to do just as 
that class wishes to do, without any thought for the rights 
of others. Now, the fraraers of the Constitution did not 
think of freedom in any such light. The arrogant assump- 
tion of the class I mention to enrich itself at the expense 
of the helpless millions is the sort of conduct which, in the 
past, * has caused revolutions. In this country, sooner or 
later, it will bring upon food speculators the public con- 



STORAGE FACILITIES ESSENTIAL 513 

demnation, and the legislative action, which has sounded 
the death-knell of the liquor traffic. 

The man who disregards such expressions of public opin- 
ion does not know his country's history. The man who 
imagines himself safe in the security of centralized wealth, 
who declares, with the customary bravado of the guilty, 
that public opinion may be sneered at, as did a so-called 
Egg King in Chicago, not long ago, is preparing for him- 
self a world of trouble. It is one of the most peculiar 
phenomena of modern times that business men, otherwise 
mentally normal, are apparently unable to realize the dan- 
ger of trying to build up in America a commercial auto- 
cracy which threatens the welfare of the people. 

Obviously, in a country so large as this we must have 
cold storage plants. The people cannot be fed from day 
to day UTiless we have a supply upon which to draw, but 
when men combine to withhold from the markets millions 
upon millions of pounds of the principal food products, as 
men have done and are doing this winter, quite frankly to 
influence the price of those products for their own benefit, 
then I believe a liberal application of the rule of food 
control for the people would be a mighty good thing for 
America. 

In tbe face of such flagrant speculation as this I find it 
possible to sympathize with the governments of Europe. 
One may deplore the strange statesmanship of those coun- 
tries in the matter of settling disputes by war, but it is 
difficult to deny our admiration for the efficient manner 
in which they deal with men who try to "corner" anything 
the people need. We need a little of that efficiency over 
here. 

With the great raihvay terminals choked with trains of 
freight, the food the markets need ; with trainloads of food 
spoiling while the West pleads for cars to transport grain, 
and coal is unobtainable because it cannot be moved, the 
whole condition due to the machinations of speculators, it 



514 SUPPRESS THE FOOD TRUSTS 

is indeed a severe strain on the country's credulity and 
patience to talk of a food shortage ! 

There are more than 6 million farms in America. Kan- 
sas, one of the big wheat states, has nearly 178,000 ! AVhat 
might happen if an embargo were placed on wheat or other 
cereals at the moment when farmers seemed most likely to 
reap a fair reward for their labor? Isn't it interesting to 
note that when the price of steel goes down the production 
decreases immediately, apparently with automatic regular- 
ity? We hear nothing about an embargo on steel or on 
munitions of war, however. It seems tliat some men turn 
naturally on the farmers when someone must be attacked 
— and agriculture the greatest industry in the world ! 

Well, the reason is not far to seek: The steel makers 
would be in Washington within a few hours if their busi- 
ness were threatened. The farmers, it seems, will meet and 
adopt a few resolutions, and then go back home and plant 
some more wheat. 

If the two pictures present a problem surely the answer 
is easy. When the farmers — and this term includes live- 
stock producers — take charge of their own business, as they 
have a perfect moral and legal right to do, when they see 
to it that their representatives in Congress are as energetic 
in the farmers' interests as other Congressmen are solicitous 
for the welfare of the munitions millionaires, then the 
farmers will get a fair share of the wealth their labor 
creates. And not one moment sooner. Take from the farmers 
of America the reward they have a right to expect for their 
part in feeding the world when most of it is at war, and 
you will deal agriculture the foulest blow in history, and 
do more than any other influence to retard its progress. 



PROBLEMS OF RURAL LIFE MANY AND DIVERSE. 

From an Address at Missouri State Agricidtural College, 
Columbia, Mo., January 14, 1914. 

The present-day problems which belong distinctively to 
the farmer are many and diverse. And every one of them 
is far reaching in its effect, many of them being entwined 
with the very life of the nation. Bill Shiftless, for ex- 
ample, may think it nobody's business but his own whether 
he raises 20 bushels of corn an acre or 100 bushels, whether 
he depletes, his soil or conserves its fertility, whether he 
lets the weeds take his crop or keeps it in a high state of 
cultivation — but Bill is wrong. The price of bread and 
butter and meat and shoes and clothing and everything the 
American public consumes is influenced by the size of Bill 
Shiftless 's crop and the condition of Bill Shiftless 's farm. 
One half the state or nation cannot prosper if the other 
half suffers. Our idle class in America is in reality very 
small and is growing smaller every day. Even our very 
few very rich people — and they are very few compared to 
the large number of us common people that Lincoln loved 
— now feel it is a disgrace not to work, or pretend to work, 
at something. The influence of one Bill Shiftless is infin- 
itesimal, to be sure, but a few hundred thousand Bill Shift- 
lesses can make or break the state or nation. 

And so it is with every problem with which you farmers 
are struggling. I do not wonder that the American farmer 
occasionally resents the benevolent interest taken in his 
affairs by the banker and the railroad president and the 
editor and the preacher and the politician — but you must 
remember that all the rest of the nation depends upon the 
farmer; all these men who preach at you and lecture you 

615 



516 PROBLEMS OF RURAL LIFE 

are vitally interested from a selfish standpoint, if you will, 
in your prosperity — because their prosperity depends upon 
you. So it is not strange that they are so ready with will- 
ing advice. 

It is not of the conservation of the soil, nor of crop rota- 
tion, nor of any other phase of technical husbandry that I 
want to talk to you — important as they are. Despite the 
very commendable progress we are making in increasing 
the yield of field and flock and herd ; despite the increased 
price, as measured by dollars and cents, which the Amer- 
ican farmer has received for his products in recent years, 
every thinking man realises that all is not well with the 
man who tills the soil. Kansas farmers on the whole are 
doing better perhaps than their fathers did; they are not 
howling calamity; they are not pessimistic, but they are 
thinking and thinking deeply on those questions which con- 
cern them and their families, and they know that things 
are not altogether and exactly right. "We don't all agree 
in our diagnosis of the trouble; we don't all agree as to 
the remedy to be applied ; but I think we all do agree that 
there is something wrong with present conditions and all 
agree that they can be bettered. 

In the first place, we have lost too many bright men and 
women who should have remained on the farm. For a half 
century our national system of taxation and our commer- 
cial system has placed a high premium upon urban life and 
has discouraged farm life — with the inevitable result that 
our city population has increased in the past few decades 
far out of all proportion to the increase of farm population. 
And aside from the luring opportunities for making money, 
the "call of the city" is perhaps a wholesome craving, born 
as it is of the desire for fellowship, for amusement and 
culture. But the cost of gratifying this desire in the city 
is very great, involving loss of neighborliness, curtailment 
of freedom, sacrifice of identity. 

I believe we should seek to develop the collective or co- 
operative method of doing the business of the farm. The 



BETTER RURAL CREDITS NEEDED 517 

co-operative plan is spreading. It should not be entered 
upon hastily, but it promises to render more help to the 
farmer than does perhaps any other one thing. 

Heretofore the farmer too often has been only a hireling 
in his own house. He has been the laborer who did the 
hard work but received only such profits as were left him 
by his industrial masters — these masters being the men 
from whom he bought his supplies ; the men who converted 
his products. into secondary form; the men who marketed 
his products; and the men who lent him money to carry 
on his business or to buy food from other farmers while 
he worked. 

When railroads, and other commercial and industrial 
concerns can borrow money at much less interest on secur- 
ity bound to fluctuate more rapidly than land or live- 
stock or crop values, it is time to put farm financing 
on a more stable and a more just basis. The farm credit 
systems of Europe may not meet our needs, but what we 
get in the future in the way of stability of loan values, 
lower rate in consequence, longer term loan, amortization 
feature by which principal is paid with the interest each 
time and the loan wiped out by the time the term is ended, 
vill be by organized effort. Alone as individuals, farmers 
are helpless in facing any of the new demands of a chang- 
ing civilization. 

I hate demagoguery, and I would do nothing to stir up 
class feeling ; but the big facts in this matter must not be 
blinked, and it will require only a little thought to show 
that the farmer has surrendered to other interests all the 
business side of agriculture apart from production, and 
that all these other interests have prospered in greater 
degree than has the farmer, who is the creator of all the 
basic wealth. The merchant who has sold the farmer his 
supplies ; the grain buyers and corn buyers and cattle buy- 
ers and cold storage plants who have marketed his product ; 
the millers and packers who have converted his product 
into more finished forms; the money-lenders and the time- 



518 PROBLEMS OF RURAL LIFE 

merchants who have furnished him credit — all these have 
taken their tolls, and in nearly every instance their profits 
have been larger than those made by the farmer himself. 
It can be shown beyond any questioil that in some lines of 
farming the farmer receives only thirty-five cents of the 
dollar which the ultimate consumer pays for the farmer's 
product. 

Now what are the lines of co-operation that we must 
develop if the farmer is really to take control of these 
profit-absorbing phases of his own business, and get his 
proper share of the final consumer's dollar? To effect 
this result it seems to me that our farmers everywhere must 
definitely resolve upon five lines of co-operation: 

(1) Co-operation in buying supplies for making farm 
products. 

(2) Co-operation in raising farm products. 

(3) Co-operation in finishing farm products. 

(4) Co-operation in standardizing and marketing farm 
products. 

(5) Co-operation in securing capital for making and 
marketing farm products. 

But you must do these things for yourselves. If you 
depend upon people in other walks of life to effect and 
carry on this work it had better never be undertaken. In 
every community lives some man or woman capable of 
leadership who could start a movement that would benefit 
a whole surrounding country, and the people know whom 
to follow. Leadership is a gift of God. He will hold you 
accountable if you are not giving your best in service. 
Here is a great opportunity, and the M^ork must be done 
at home. 

If our country is worth living in and fighting for, let 
us love it so well that we shall be glad to accept the charge 
of citizenship as a duty as well as a privilege and to give 
it businesslike thought and consideration. 



CHURCH AND WELFARE ADDRESSES 

Born a Quaker, during much of his life Arthur Capper 
did not have access to a house of worship of that faith, and 
so associated himself with other denominations. In this 
way he acquired a wide catholicity of view. It is thru the 
avenue of the church, the Y. M. C. A. and similar organi- 
zations that most of his views in regard to social improve- 
ment and human welfare have been voiced. 



THE CHURCH AND ITS CIVIC DUTY. 

From an Address at the Dedication of Atchison M. E. 
Chvrch, September 5, 1915. 

My friends, I am not at all sure that this Sabbath eve- 
ning might not have been more profitably spent had I sat 
in a pew, and with you listened to a real sermon preached 
by your faitliful pastor — the man who ministers to your 
spiritual needs— who knows the message that your souls 
require at this time. 

It is as a layman and a fellow Kansan that I address 
you; my only hope is that I may leave with you a fcM^ 
thoughts that will strengthen your hands, awaken your 
enthusiasm and inspire your courage for the big task you 
have undertaken. 

You good people of Atchison "purpose to build a house 
for the name of the Lord, my God, ' ' as Solomon did of old 
— to erect a temple, a place of worship, that shall be fit 
and proper, and in keeping with the bounties that the 

519 



520 THE CHURCH AND CIVIC DUTY 

Almighty has showered upon you. You will bring your 
gifts — some cheerfully, some grudgingly; some liberally 
and some with no great bounty — but you will come as the 
spirit moves you and give your mite or your thousands to 
the building of this beautiful temple which shall stand for 
generations as a monument to the sober-minded, God-fear- 
ing people of Atchison — a testimony to your love of right- 
eousness, a visible evidence to the Almighty that your 
minds are not entirely engrossed with the material things 
of life — that j^our hearts are not wholly given to the world 
and its ways. 

And I am sure that the members of this church and 
congregation will feel that God has given them a great 
opportunity in the work before them; an opportunity for 
loyalty ; an opportunity for devotion ; an opportunity above 
all for sacrifice ! 

Let us silently give thanks to the God in whose honor 
you are about to erect a temple, that this opportunity has 
come to you, that the privilege was not withheld from you 
and passed on to your children or your children's children 
—that now is the time and the opportunity is yours! 

My friends, I shall not presume to speak to you of the 
spiritual aspect of your new house of worship. But as a 
layman, as a citizen, and as one of your public officials, 
I am glad of the opportunity to say a few words to you 
tonight about the place the Church occupies in the life and 
well-being of Kansas and of the nation. 

It is true that we are living in an age of materialism; 
the only God that many of us know seems to be the Al- 
mighty Dollar. 

I do not believe that we are as a nation less religious 
than other peoples; I do not believe that we love money 
and material things more than do other nations ; we have 
had big things to do. "We had a wilderness to conquer — 
a continent to cover with a network of railways — cities to 
build ; mines, such as the world never before had dreamed 
of, to develop ; rivers to span, forests to convert into fields, 



AN AGE OF MATERIALISM 521 

and deserts to make bloom as a garden. We have liad a 
new civilization to plant in a wilderness — and it has been 
a task calling for all the energy, all the vigor, all the con- 
centration of strong men and women. 

It has been easy for us, engrossed in this work, to become 
so absorbed in it that we forget the higher things of life. 
It has been easy for the man intent upon conquering the 
elements, upon annihilating space, upon making a million 
bushels of grain grow where none grew before, to forget 
that his help and strength must come from above and to 
postpone the consideration of the eternal verities to a more 
convenient season. It has been easy for us to rely so wholly 
upon our own efforts that we have lain ourselves open to 
the charge that we are money-mad and that our people, 
our nation, is grossly materialistic. 

We are a careless people, but at the bottom we are not 
an irreligious people. I am happy in the belief that the 
great heart of the American people — however indifferent 
we may seem and however lax we may be — is not antago- 
nistic to the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this 
to me is what makes the opportunity of the Church ; this, 
it is, that calls for renewed and unceasing effort on the 
part of all those who say in faith "Thy Kingdom come." 

I cannot conceive of any sane man living in America in 
this Twentieth Century, who can fail to recognize the value 
of the Christian Church to the community and to the state. 
Putting aside the salvation of human souls — ignoring the 
spiritual welfare of the human race, the Church still stands 
as the great bulwark of our civilization, the most vital thing 
in our national life, the anchor which holds us to our ideals, 
the leaven which permeates society and keeps it alive. 

We may freely acknowledge that the Church on earth is 
far from perfect — it cannot attain perfection so long as it 
is made up of imperfect, fallible human beings. We may 
freely admit that it has shortcomings ; but at the same time 
we must recognize that our civilization, our culture, our 



522 THE CHURCH AND CIVIC DUTY 

very existence as a nation rest upon the Church of the Liv- 
ing God and its teachings. America without it, is incon- 
ceivable. 

We must not forget, as we sometimes do, that colonial 
America was populated very largely by men and women 
seeking religious freedom. There were a few soldiers of 
fortune and adventurers, a few shiploads of ticket-of-leave 
men, but the early colonies were founded by the Puritans, 
the Baptists, the Quakers, the French Hugenots, and other 
God-fearing people seeking the right to build their own 
churches and to worship God in accordance with the dic- 
tates of their own consciences. 

It was the consuming desire — the passion for religious 
freedom, more than for political freedom that led to the 
colonization of that part of America which now dominates 
the continent — and who can ' doubt that this one fact ex- 
plains the vigor and strength of the nation they founded ? 

With this idea of religious freedom, bred in the bone of 
the hardy pioneers, came the broad ideas of justice, fra- 
ternity and equality which inevitably led to tlie demand 
for national freedom. The colonial parsons, thundering 
from their pulpits, were the mainstay of the agitation 
w^hich culminated in the Declaration of Independence, the 
American Revolution, and the birth of a new nation. To 
the Church, then, and its ideals, to the men and women 
fired with the zeal which the Church inspires, we are in 
large measure indebted for the colonization, and settling 
of our country and for the establishing of a system of ,iust 
government among men. 

And, in the next century, when the nation was to be born 
anew; when in a baptism of blood the great question of 
human freedom was to be settled forever, it was the pulpit 
that cried, in season and out of season, against the black 
crime of human slavery. Without the quickening of con- 
science, Avithout the appeal to mankind's sense of right and 
justice which came like the thunders of Sinai from the 
pulpits of American churches, the abolition of slavery on 



OUR DEBT TO THE CHURCH 523 

this continent would have been impossible. It was the 
Church and its God-fearing membership that saved the 
nation. 

To the Church we are largely indebted for the American 
educational system. It was the ministers of the gospel, the 
preachers, who founded and directed the early years of 
almost every college of note in this country. In recent 
years the states have founded state universities and estab- 
lished schools of various sorts, but for generations, all the 
institutions of higher learning in America were in the care 
of the Church and almost entirely supported by church 
funds. 

Take away what the Church has contributed to educa- 
tion, to literature, and to general culture in America, and 
we would be an ignorant, boorish, half-educated people. 

Indeed, if the Church had done nothing else for Amer- 
ica, than to keep alive that wonderful piece of literature, 
so rich in history, philosophy, poetry and drama, that 
sacred book we call the Bible — had the Church contributed 
nothing to our moral welfare or our spiritual life — it still 
would be worth while, if it gave us this wonderful book. 

Let us add, too, that there was never a time when our 
boys and girls so needed the old-fashioned molding of char- 
acter, only attained thru religious training, as they 
need it today amid the distractions and temptations of 
modern life. Years ago when the religious world was split 
up into narrow creeds, the five minutes of Bible reading 
and morning prayer was discontinued in the public schools 
thru a mistaken zeal for religious freedom. For gen- 
erations, the Avorld's thinkers and writers have declared 
the Bible to be humanity's greatest source of inspiration 
and power. The one book which has had the greatest and 
the most ennobling influence on the world ought not to be 
longer barred from the public schools, one of its most 
potent and most important fields of usefulness. 

But, my friends, the Church lives not as a political factor 
— tho it has been most potent in shaping our political 



524 THE CHURCH AND CIVIC DUTY 

existence ; not as an educational nor as a cultural institu- 
tion — tho we owe to it the most of our culture; not 
merely as the arbiter of morals and ethics — tho we 
draw all our ethical ideas from it. The Church lives and 
grows only because it is, and when it is, a vital part of the 
spiritual life of the 100 million men and women who make 
up this nation. 

It is only when the Church brings to the individual a 
full, spiritual life that it is able to perform its true func- 
tion in society and in the nation. The Church has but one 
mission — and that is to bring the love of the Lord Jesus 
Christ — His regenerating salvation — into the hearts of men 
and women. All other things which flow from the Church 
are side-issues — by-products. 

I am not afraid of the Church in politics — indeed, I think 
the Church is derelict in its duty when it does not speak 
plainly, strongly, emphatically, on every great moral ques- 
tion which enters into our political life. 

The Church perhaps has no place in what we ordinarily 
call "partisan politics," but more and more are political 
issues becoming moral issues and we must look to the 
Church and its leaders — if they are in truth "leaders of 
men ' ' — not only to fire men 's souls with zeal for righteous- 
ness in the abstract, but to stand like adamant for specific, 
definite measures that tend to righteousness and faithful, 
earnest, patriotic service in public affairs. 

The Church must not falter here. 

I am convinced that we are on the eve of a great battle 
in behalf of higher ideals and higher standards in our 
business life and especially in our political life. I have 
just returned from a conference in Boston where I met the 
governors of thirty-eight states. Nothing impressed me 
more than the interest manifested, not only by these gov- 
ernors gathered from all parts of the Union, but by the 



THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC 525 

people of the entire East, in the question of the prohibition 
of the liquor traffic. 

They want to know about it. 

In the past, many good men have honestly and sincerely 
doubted the possibility, or at least the practicability of 
prohibition. But, their eyes are being opened. Despite 
the systematic campaign of misrepresentation, kept up by 
the liquor interests, the fair-minded people of America are 
learning that prohibition not only is within the range of 
possibilities, but that it is an actuality that prohibition 
does exist in Kansas and that it does prohibit! They are 
intensely interested when I tell them that there are a half- 
million young people in this state who never have seen an 
open saloon — and they say "What Kansas can do, we can 
do!" 

National prohibition is coming, my friends; nothing can 
stop it, if the Church and the good men and women who 
make up its membership, determine that it shall come — 
and are not afraid to do their duty. 

And that other great scourge of human life, the twin 
evil that has blackened the pages of history and afflicted 
the world since time began — the White Slave traffic. It 
is as surely doomed — if the decent people of America have 
faith in the ultimate triumph of good. 

The change in the attitude of the general public on this 
question within the last five years has been marvelous. 
I*ublic officials entrusted with the enforcement of law, no 
longei* laugh away protests at the law's violation. They 
no longer attempt to defend the black infamy of segregat- 
ing these plague spots and these wretched victims of man's 
lust for the purpose of levying tribute upon them. They 
are feeling the pressure of public opinion and in almost 
every city in the Union they are making at least a pretense 
of the enforcement of law and the maintenance of decency. 

When a gangrenous spot is discovered on the human 
body, safety from further infection and death is found in 
thoroly cleansing and disinfecting the lesion. To neg- 



526 THE CHURCH AND CIVIC DUTY 

lect this living death, to tolerate it, to hide it from heal- 
ing influences, is to invite the entire destruction of the 
body by the most fearful and loathsome form of disease. 

It is equally true that the community which has become 
diseased, which tolerates political corruption, which enters 
into partnership with illicit vice or which winks at viola- 
tion of law in any form is as surely rotting alive as the 
moribund human being whose powers of resistance have 
surrendered to bodily corruption. 

The time is ripe for the eradication of public vice and 
it will be eradicated if the decent men and women of 
America once attack it in earnest. The Church can solve 
this ancient problem of the social evil, and will solve it, 
just as soon as it burns into the hearts and into the con- 
sciences of men the great fact that there can be no double 
standard of morality — that the man who breaks the divine 
commandment is as impure, is as degraded, physically, 
morally, spiritually, as the woman. 

When men and women look upon the libertine with the 
same disgust they have for the scarlet woman ; when society 
and the Church accord the same even-handed justice to 
both sinners — the problem of the social evil will be solved 
— and not until then ! 

I feel, too, my friends, that the Church in America has 
a great duty to perform and a great opportunity in con- 
nection with the war which is now devastating so large a 
part of the civilized world. Horror has been piled upon 
horror until the human mind is unable to grasp the awful- 
ness of what is happening. 

We had lulled ourselves with the thought that another 
great war never could occur between Christian nations. 
We had hoped and dreamed that the followers of the 
Prince of Peace never again would take up the sword 
against their brothers. And yet we find the leading na- 
tions of the world, the highest exponents of the Christian 
religion, flying at each other's throats with prayers upon 
their lips. We see hatred filling the hearts of Christian 



WAR IS UNNECESSARY 527 

peoples; we see savagery and cruelty not surpassed by the 
barbarians. God in His wise providence, has so far enabled 
us to escape this almost world-wide cataclysm. 

Would we be more patient if put to the test? 

The spirit of "jingoism"; the carrying of a chip on the 
shoulder; the tendency to hot-headed impetuosity; racial 
hatred, and that greed which leads men to over-reach, to 
take by might whatever they can — all of these tendencies 
still exist in too many American hearts. I need not say 
to you that no one of them is compatible with the Christian 
spirit or "with the teachings of Christ. 

I shall not say that war always has been avoidable in 
the past — I shall waive that point — but I do say that if 
the Church of the Living God does its duty, from this day 
forth, war will not only be avoidable, but it will be im- 
possible. 

War in the past may have been in some notable cases, 
unavoidable, but war today is unnecessary, and if the pro- 
fessed Christians of the world will stand steadfast in their 
adherence to the ideal of Universal Peace, there will be no 
more war. 

In the last decade there has been a great awakening of 
the American conscience in everything affect>iji^ the pub- 
lic welfare and the public policies. 

Yet it has been with great difficulty and often in the 
face of the bitterest opposition that we have written upon 
the statute books laws for ameliorating the condition of the 
unfortunate; laws for establishing greater justice between 
men; laws for protecting the weak from the greedy and 
powerful. 

I believe genuine advance has been made. We have ac- 
complished much. But, my friends, what we have done is 
only a mere beginning. There still are evils and injustices 
"ancient as the sun," which we should not and must not 
countenance in a Christian nation. 

What are we going to do about them? 

Are we going to rest satisfied with what we have ae- 



528 THE CHURCH AND CIVIC DUTY 

complished? Are we going to allow this little spasm of 
reform to pass? Are we going to drop peacefully and 
carelessly back into our old ways, or are we going forward 
with a stout heart to meet the new problems that every day 
brings forth, trusting to God to give us the strength, the 
wisdom, the steady, unflagging purpose necessary to solve 
them? 

Are we going to do this — you and I and all of us? 

The answer to this question depends very largely upon 
the Church. It is upon the minds and consciences of the 
people that government depends. If we have a righteous, 
God-fearing, intelligent people, who bring to their politics 
sober thought, who consider the moral and ethical sides of 
the problems with which they deal — we shall have right- 
eous and just laws, and righteous and just government. 
But if our people have low moral standards, if they ac- 
custom themselves to thinking that public office as an op- 
portunity for graft, if they look at public questions solely 
from the viewpoint of their personal advantage or profit, 
or from a narrow partisan viewpoint, we shall always have 
a slack, inefficient, extravagant administration of public 
affairs. 

I believe in . the American Republic ; I believe in our 
form of government. It is not perfect — it is not a sacred, 
nor a finished product — but I am strong in the faith that 
it is the best form of government on God's beautiful earth 
today. But, admirable as it is, it depends — absolutely de- 
pends — upon honest men and women, sober-thinking, fear- 
less, determined men and women, who are willing, if need 
be, to make personal sacrifices for the general good. 

I believe in the patriotism of the American people; an 
honest appeal to the love of country brings a quick response 
from every true American. I love our flag, our beautiful 
symbol of nationality, which never yet has been unfurled 
in a dishonorable cause, and which never has been furled 



THE AMERICAN IDEAL 529 

in disgrace ; and I know that that flag is an inspiration to 
millions of patriotic citizens. 

But — my friends — the ultimate triumph of the Amer- 
ican ideal — the attainment of equal justice and oppor- 
tunity for all our people — the giving of a full chance to 
the humblest citizen, must spring from something deeper 
even than the noblest patriotism; it must come from some- 
thing more sacred even than our love for the flag that 
symbolizes our national honor. 

It can come only from a deep and inherent love of right- 
eousness — the- broad, all-comprehending righteousness em- 
bodied in the gospel of Christ, the righteousness for which 
the Church of God stands. 

"We cannot have a righteous nation — and that, my 
friends, despite the sneers of the materialists, is the Amer- 
ican ideal — we cannot have a righteous nation until we 
have a righteous people, and we shall have a righteous 
people only when the Church lives up to its full oppor- 
tunity and performs its full duty. 

God grant that this Church and the Church as a whole, 
may hasten the day. 

My heartfelt prayer is that this campaign for rekindling 
and spreading the fires of Methodism in Atchison by the 
erection of a fine new church edifice will be accompanied 
by abundant divine blessing and meet with unprecedented 
victory. 



CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP. 

From an Address at Horton M. E. Church, October 7, 1917. 

My friends, let me give you a little pictvire of real Kan- 
sas prosperity as I saw it last Sunday morning in Topeka. 
I saw four little folks with shining faces, eyes and minds 
alert, neatly and sensibly dressed — the oldest not more 
than 7 — board a street car by themselves on their way to 



530 CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP 

Sunday school. They were a jolly and happy little party, 
four better-conditioned children could not be found any- 
where. Their parents evidently were churchgoers who had 
lived their religion — and whom religious faith and sensible 
living had prospered richly. All these things were plainly 
to be seen in these children, sensibly, comfortably, simply 
and pleasingly dressed, wanting for nothing, and traveling 
along the same road of right living, stable character and 
sturdy principles that their parents had traveled before 
them. This is real success in life. There is no higher pros- 
perity, no happier, none more lasting. Best of all, we 
know that in Kansas the saloon cannot get these children. 

I should like to see in the American home and especially 
in every Kansas home a revival of the old-time household 
religion, the short family service of prayer, the invocation 
of the divine blessing at the family board. These simple 
and solemn observances of the old-fashioned American 
home were and are the cornerstones of Christian citizen- 
ship — and a citizenship that above all things wishes to be 
right in our mightiest defense against every evil. These 
brief and simple observances of religion in every-day life 
have far-reaching power. Two or three times in every day 
they remind everyone of the higher life of the spirit, they 
steady the young people and strengthen them in purpose 
and in character. They make their elders better and nobler 
men and women, and life happier, more wholesome, more 
really prosperou-s and sane. 

But lest some of you be discouraged at what you see 
around you, or possibly by what you don't see, let me tell 
you that Christian citizenship is looking up in this coun- 
try. It was never more manifest in our beloved land than 
it is today, nor more aggressive. It is greater and more 
prevalent than you think. It is leavening the lump, even 
in the great cities. Its spirit is the dominating, the com- 
pelling, the all-conquering spirit of Kansas and America. 
And it is marching on. It is moving state and nation with 



EQUITY AND JUSTICE 531 

increasing and irresistible power toward state and national 
welfare and progress. 

It is insisting that drink and prostitution, the great 
twin scourges of humanity, shall not be permitted to ruin 
America. 

It is urging living w^ages, wholesome homes and happy 
family life for all its workers. 

It is demanding and gradually obtaining a schooling for 
boys and girls that annually will not turn great masses of 
them adrift without knowledge that will make them capa- 
ble and self-supporting. 

It is insisting on prompt and ready justice for the poor 
litigant and the rich litigant. 

It is compelling the honest, efficient and economical ex- 
penditure of public funds for the benefit of all the people, 
and it is demanding that its public servants shall know 
their work and do it faithfully, loyally, industriously and 
well, while serving one and only one master. 



A SOCIAL SERVICE PROGRAM. 

From an Address to the Kansas City, Kan., Council of 
Cluhs, April 6, 1917. 

I want first to congratulate your Council of Clubs on 
its splendid work in behalf of civic righteousness and a 
cleaner city. To me it is a most significant fact that one 
of the most powerful factors in modern democratic gov- 
ernment which sets human beings above material things, 
has been the woman's clubs. I rejoice that in Kansas City, 
the Council of Clubs is throwing its forces with greater 
zeal than ever before, behind those constructive measures 
which make for the best in home and civic betterment; for 
the best in social, moral and educational uplift ; for all the 
influences which are active in the building of manly boys. 



532 A SOCIAL SERVICE PROGRAM 

of womanly girls, of clean and useful men and women, and 
which are doing their full share in the solution of the great 
human interest questions that will make the world better 
and happier and stimulate a richer and more abundant life. 

I am happy to know that the people of Kansas City are 
rapidly being educated in the functions of social control, 
in the meaning of social conditions, in preventing the un- 
necessary waste of human life, in the effect on the com- 
munity of neglected children and untrained youth, in the 
need of civic improvement generally, and we have the best 
reason to be thankful that this education is going on, for 
these problems of government never can be humanly solved 
until they become the problems of the intelligence and 
morality of all the people. 

We have reason, too, to feel encouraged that gradually 
we are getting aAvay from the ancient notion that the chief 
object of government is to wage war, to enact laws, to place 
men in office, and to hand out contracts to favorites. A 
higher conception of the governmental function is being 
evolved. Gradually the idea is taking root that the prin- 
cipal purpose of government is the fostering and preserva- 
tion of comfortable and happy homes for all the people. 
The meaning of this is that conditions shall be so shaped 
as to afford persevering individuals the opportunity to 
establish themselves in business, to enjoy the fruits of 
their labor, to be equal beneficiaries of whatsoever can be. 
brought about thru instrumentalities affecting the well- 
being of the great body of the people. 

The records of the state health department at Topeka 
show that of the 2,102 children born in Kansas City last 
year, 216 died under 1 year of age. I am informed by 
Dr. Crumbine that at least 125 of these 216 children would 
be living now had we as individuals and as a community, 
applied those measures of hygiene and sanitation which are 
known to be available. 

A little more than one out of every ten infant children 
in Kansas City die before they reach the end of their first 



MUST SAVE THE CHILDREN 533 

year. It is a regrettable fact that the percentage of these 
deaths, according to the official records, is larger in Kan- 
sas City than in any other city in the state. 

Experts in the diseases of children are unanimous in the 
opinion that 60 per cent of the children that die under 1 
year of age, die from preventable causes, which so far as 
possible it is the duty of the city and state to remove. 

We need purer food, better milk and an agitation for 
cleaner stores. Already there has been much good work 
done in Kansas City in cleaning up the groceries, the meat 
markets, the restaurants, the milk depots and the fruit 
and candy stands, but I am told there is need of more such 
work in this city and probably in every city in Kansas. 

We should not fail to give most serious consideration to 
that unnecessary death roll, in cities like this, of babies 
whose parents receive the lowest wage, live in the poorest 
fashion, and are the most neglected by the communities of 
which they are too helpless to be a conscious part. 

Public sentiment must be aroused to the need of greater 
cleanliness and more decent and wholesome conditions in 
the poorer districts. The clean-up of bad homes, and of 
unsanitary and injurious environments, should form the 
ground work of much future child protection effort. Kan- 
sas City is one of the best and cleanest cities in the Middle 
West, but I am informed by your police officers that they 
can take me to several hundred houses in Kansas City that 
are filthy, unsanitary, uncomfortable, and not fit to be 
inhabited by human beings. I am told that in many in- 
stances they are owned by big corporations or by persons 
of wealth who seem to be interested only in the profit of 
8 or 10 per cent that they gather in this way year after 
year, and give not a thought to what they return to the 
welfare of the women and children who call these miserable 
shanties their homes. Many a case of typhoid fever, of 
diphtheria and other serious diseases has spread from the 
imperfect sanitary conditions in and about these houses. 
It may be that it is because of a yard undrained, a soil 



534 A SOCIAL SERVICE PROGRAM 

laden with impurities ; outbuildings shockingly unprotected 
and a menace to morals and health, floors covered with 
rotting planks, windows loosely hung, bad plumbing, plas- 
ter gone or wall paper mildewed; at any rate, public senti- 
ment needs to be aroused to these evils if we are to obtain 
cleanliness and decent conditions. 

I believe there is a great opportunity for the Council of 
Clubs if all its members will use their influence in every 
possible way to make sure that no child in Kansas City — 
no matter how humble his parents — is denied the oppor- 
tunity to obtain a complete common school education — an 
education and a training that will equip the boy or the 
girl to meet and conquer life's difficulties. I am informed 
by Miss Bresette, state factory inspector and secretary of 
the Industrial Welfare commission, that an average of 
three children a day are quitting school in Kansas City 
and going to work without adequate school preparation. 
Miss Bresette tells me that a few weeks ago she interviewed 
the 3^oung women employed in one of your large packing 
houses and found that 125 out of 225 virtually had no 
education. Many of these girls cannot write their own 
names. This is no fault of the school authorities. In some 
instances the parents of these children do not appreciate 
the need of an education for their children, but in a ma- 
jority of cases they are from the families of poor people 
who have come here from Europe within the last year or 
two, and the parents actually need the wages of the chil- 
dren to provide food and clothing for the family. 

Under our law, children can leave school after their 15th 
year, even tho they have not gone thru the grades. Un- 
doubtedly conditions could be greatly improved in a city 
like yours if we could have a law in this state provid- 
ing for the supervision of employment of boys and girls, 
under tlie direction of the school authorities, and requir- 
ing stricter educational qualifications in addition to the 
age qualifications we now have. Under this arrangement 
employers would not hire boys or girls without consulting 



ENCOURAGE CIVIC IMPROVEMENT 535 

the superintendent of schools, Avho would have authority 
to say whether the pupil had been in school long enough 
and whether he was in other respects worthy of employ- 
ment. The young people would then make a greater effort 
to qualify themselves. 

I am glad to say that the mothers' compensation act, 
popularly known as the mothers' pension law, is being 
more conscientiously observed in Kansas City than in any 
other city in the state. Wyandotte has paid out more 
money under this law than any other county in Kansas. 
. If I have one particular hobby, it is flower growing and 
back-lot gardening by the boys and girls of Kansas. I 
hope the time will come when every child in every city of 
Kansas will have some part in the great work of making 
their home town more beautiful. 

Flower growing by the children will help not only to 
make Kansas City a more beautiful city, but will awaken 
and stimulate in them a love for the beautiful in nature. 
Unconsciously the boy or girl sees in the violet the touch 
of the hand of God. Every successful attempt to adorn a 
city lot or a city park has a far-reaching influence upon 
the community. For children the growth of a flower is 
like the discovery of a new world. For them flower grow- 
ing has a spiritual value that goes to the very roots of that 
inner life which is our best shield against evil influences. 
A happy sense of ownership is developed in the children. 
It is gratifying to them to see the flower bed developed 
into a blaze of beauty, as if the result of their own work- 
manship, and the child never after wholly gets away from 
this divine influence. 

Think how a dozen stately hollyhocks or a half-dozen 
climbing roses in every back yard would add to the beauty 
of Kansas City this summer ! 

Seven years ago I started in Topeka what was known as 
the Daily Capital Juvenile Flower Club. Since then we 
have given away at our office more than 100,000 packages 
of flower seeds. Last April more than 3,000 boys and girls 



536 A SOCIAL SERVICE PROGRAM 

called at the Daily Capital office and were enrolled as 
members of our club. Each child is given printed sugges- 
tions for successful flower culture. We required a pledge 
that they would plant the five packages of flower seeds 
which we gave them, care for them thru the summer months 
and take at least two bouquets to sick persons in hospitals 
or private homes. 

Which summer school will most probably lead a boy in 
the paths in which he should walk — for his good and ours — 
the school of idleness on the streets, among the dirt and 
filth of the alleys, or inspiring, helpful, elevating work in a 
flower garden at his home? 

More than 10,000 school children in this city remain at 
home during the summer vacation without any useful, 
healthful, productive occupation requiring any large part 
of their time. On the other hand, there is much valuable 
land in back yards and vacant lots that is serving no useful 
purpose. The object is to bring this land and these chil- 
dren together, and you and I should help bring this about. 
It is difficult to estimate the far-reaching results of this 
plan when it shall be put in full operation thruout a city. 
For the children it will mean health, strength, joy in 
work, habits of industry, and understanding of the value 
of money as measured in terms of labor, and such knowl- 
edge of the phenomena and forces of nature as must be 
had for an understanding of many of their school lessons. 
They will also learn something at least, of the fundamental 
principles of thrift and industry — that each individual 
must make his or her own living; must, by some kind of 
labor of head, hand or heart, contribute to the common- 
wealth as much as he takes from it ; must pay for what he 
gets in some kind of coin. 

Another phase of the problem of humanity right here in 
Kansas City and in Kansas, and one that has made a deep 
impression upon me because at times it is the most serious 
of all, is the problem of unemployment. You may be in- 
clined to doubt that there are worthy, industrious men out 



A SQUARE DEAL FOR ALL 537 

of employment and on the verge of starvation. But you 
do not know the conditions. There has scarcely been a 
day in the last year that I have not had calls from able- 
bodied men and women eager for employment, ready to 
accept any kind of honorable work because they have fami- 
lies actually in need of food and clothing. Neither is it 
any uncommon thing for young girls, often without a 
friend or relative in the city, new to the game of finding 
work, thrown on their own resources to find a livelihood 
where and how they can, to come to my office pleading for 
work of any kind that will enable them to meet expenses 
of rent and board at some cheap rooming house. These 
conditions exist also in Kansas City and all the larger cities. 

I think we should have as a part of our scheme of city 
government in every city of 50,000 or more, a public wel- 
fare bureau supported by funds from the city treasury. 
Such a bureau really would prove an investment, or at least 
an economy rather than an expense. Its duty would be to 
see that disease-breeding, unsanitary tenements were trans- 
formed into livable habitations, to find help or employ- 
ment for the needy, to clean up vice conditions and espe- 
cially to look after and combine those social nnd civic bet- 
terments now dependent on charity, or left at loose ends, 
which when neglected constitute one of the greatest causes 
of disease, poverty, vice and even crime in every city and 
that in one way or another combine to make one of the 
greatest items of public expense in every urban community. 

I say that every honest, industrious man and Avoman has 
a right to demand of society a chance to work — a chance 
to earn good food, decent clothing, a comfortable home and 
an education for their children. Society cannot in safety 
turn a deaf ear to that demand. 'It is one of the problems 
too long neglected, a problem that must be solved promptly 
and along constructive and practical lines. 

And while I am before you, permit me to emphasize a 
crying need, in Topeka, in Kansas City, as well as in other 
Kansas cities and perhaps every county in Kansas, for 



538 A SOCIAL SERVICE PROGRAM 

what, lacking a better name, I shall call a detention home. 
We should have a better place than a jail and its society 
of depraved and hardened criminals in which to place 
deserted, abandoned, unfortunate girls and women. Our 
jails, the best of them, are hotbeds of vice, crime and dis- 
ease. We should also have separate detention homes for 
boys and girls — the homeless waifs, the wandering little 
vagrants, the numerous juvenile offenders, the boys and 
girls wlio for perhaps the first and last time in their lives 
have stumbled or been misled into some offense, while we 
take measures to restore them to friends and family, or to 
find them appropriate care and training in our state insti- 
tutions. 

And is it such a light thing to attach the stigma of "jail- 
bird" for life to some child that really hasn't been wicked? 
It seems to me this is urgent, that we cannot with good 
grace continue to send missionaries to the heathen while 
as a civilized people we permit our present jail methods 
with respect to women and children to continue. 

Another reform in which I hope the women of Kansas 
City will show an active interest, has for its object greater 
justice in the state's treatment of the families of persons 
convicted of crime. Crime must be punished; men who 
are a menace to society must be incarcerated, and it is just 
and right that while incarcerated, they be made to labor, 
but to my mind it is barbarous and inhuman for the state 
to profit from their labor so long as the criminal's family 
needs support. As it is now, helpless women and innocent 
children are often left to fight life's battle alone, to strug- 
gle and to suffer hardships as great or even greater than 
those imposed upon the criminal himself. 

I believe that every convict in our state's prison should 
be given employment at public work, and that a large part 
of his earnings, other than that expended by the state for 
his support, should be turned over to the innocent women 
and children who are dependent upon him for their sus- 
tenance. Neither have I any sympathy with a prison pol- 



BANISH THE DARK DUNGEON 539 

icy which makes confirmed criminals out of men and boys 
who are not beyond redemption. As long as there is a 
chance to make a good citizen of a human who is strug- 
gling to regain his place in society, it is our duty to try to 
help him up instead of pushing him down and holding 
him down. 

Our present system of punishment for criminals is bar- 
barous. I am more and more strongly of the opinion it 
must be our policy that prisoners be taken away from high 
walls and put upon the land. God's out-of-doors should 
take the place of the dark dungeon. Road building and 
farm work are better adapted to corrective character build- 
ing than the dark prison cell. 

Also it is to my mind a travesty of justice when a judge 
imposes a fine on an outcast woman who, because she is an 
outcast, has no means of support open to her but to return 
to her dreaded life. It is absolutely true that redemption 
is impossible for such women under present conditions. 
Unaided they are helpless and we now have no place to 
shelter and protect them until they may face life anew 
under fairer auspices ; we actually force them to go to per- 
dition. The Girls' Industrial School at Beloit cannot take 
delinquent women offenders that are over 18 years old. I 
wish that every such woman might be committed to an in- 
stitution that would give her this one chance to reform, 
that at least the first commitment might be to an Industrial 
Home or Reformatory where she would get training that 
would make it possible for her to earn an honest living. 
A little thinking will convince us that we can better afford 
to do something of this kind than not to, no matter from 
what viewpoint we look at it. 

In considering all these great problems of city building 
let us ever keep in mind that social service should be dis- 
tinguished from mere charity and rescue work. It differs 
from charitable work in this, that instead of doling out 
soup and old clothes, it helps people to help themselves by 
keeping well, by keeping clean and at work. From rescue 



540 A SOCIAL SERVICE PEOGRAM 

work it differs in this, that it is a method of prevention 
rather than a cure. It builds a wall at the top of the pre- 
cipice rather than maintains a hospital at the bottom; it 
argues that it is more desirable to save girls before they 
go wrong than to establish a rescue home in the red-light 
district. 

I know that you stand for all these things I have men- 
tioned, and that it takes some courage to stand for them. 
In every community, they who fight for cleaner, healthier, 
more decent and more efficient conditions of life have al- 
ways been denounced by those who are afraid that a better 
protection of human life, or an attempt to make social con- 
ditions more wholesome, would injure either their purses 
or the town's treasured traditional reputation. But you 
ladies know, of course, that you can't clean house by hiding 
the dirt, and he who would attempt to hide the faults of 
his town rather than correct them is a false friend to the 
community. 

For more than two generations — nearly half the lifetime 
of our nation — the people of Kansas have been leaders in 
all humane, reformatory and progressive movements; and 
much of the advance which Kansas and the nation have 
made is due to the intelligent effort and the high-minded 
devotion of the big-hearted women of the state. And I 
am happy in the hope and in the belief that this influence 
is to grow and extend. Woman is making her influence 
for good felt in our legislative halls today as never before. 
Every humanitarian project is benefited by her active par- 
ticipation in civic affairs. All the commendable move- 
ments for ameliorating the conditions under which the 
race lives; the right of the new-born babe to a fair start 
in life; justice to women and girls in industry; reforma- 
tory measures for the weak of all classes ; nation-wide pro- 
hibition ; equal suffrage for the women of the whole nation ; 
pensions to Avorthy mothers for care and support of minor 
children ; humane and temperance education — all these 
have the earnest support of the intelligent women of this 



THE DOCTRINE OF HELPFULNESS 541 

state and are being forced upon our law-makers with an 
insistence which will take no denial. With her truer in- 
stinct and bigger heart, woman is quick to see injustice, 
and prompt to demand its righting', Kansas, the geo- 
graphical center of the nation ; Kansas, blest beyond meas- 
ure by the Giver of all good ; Kansas, with its intelligent, 
happy and aspiring people, must in the future as it has in 
the past do its full share in meeting social, economic and 
political problems ; in establishing greater justice ; in abol- 
ishing inequalities ; and Kansas is thrice blessed in having 
for this work as part and parcel of her citizenship noble- 
hearted, high-minded women so intensely concerned in the 
public weal. 

So I appeal to you to encourage and promote the doc- 
trine of helpfulness. Let's take a still deeper interest in 
the cause of the less fortunate, the struggling, the op- 
pressed, the down-and-out; encourage and help those who 
are trying to better conditions, and make them feel and 
know that our schools, our churches, our women's clubs, 
our newspapers, are human institutions, that the great 
democratic spirit of brotherhood is here, in fact, in Kansas. 



LINCOLN AND HUMAN WELFARE. 

From an Address to the Topeha Industrial Council, on 
Lincoln Day, Topcka, Fehruary 12, 1918. 

One hundred and nine years ago today in a rude cabin 
in Kentucky, in what was then the very outskirts of civil- 
ization, there was born to two plain, humble and I suspect 
unambitious, common folk, a male child. 

The gods play strange tricks with the set notions of men. 
We give place and honor and favor to those we consider 
the mighty of Earth — and then out of nowiiere — out of 



542 LINCOLN AND HUMAN WELFARE 

the desert — from the waste places — unheralded and un- 
sung, there springs a mightier than them all. 

Moses, child of a slave woman, was drawn from the bul- 
rushes to lead the children of Israel to the Promised Land. 

David, the little shepherd lad from the hills, unskilled 
in the arts of war, and shy and backward before the swag- 
gering, boastful troopers, put the arrogant Philistines to 
flight. 

The little son of Joseph, the humble carpenter of Naza- 
reth, confounded the Avisdom of the learned doctors and 
gave mankind the way of salvation. 

And so it was with Abraham Lincoln. In parentage, in 
environment, in education — or at least in schooling — he 
was the last' man whom the worldly wise would choose as 
the saviour of a nation ; tbe last man to whose hands we 
would trust the helm of the ship of state in times so trying 
and amid dangers so terrifying. The so-called "better ele- 
ment" of the nation, the wealth, the culture — they who so 
calmly assume an air of superiority to the common herd — 
could not understand the folly of the people manifested 
in their blind enthusiasm for a "back-woodsman," "an 
uncouth village politician." And yet the people swept 
aside a Seward, a Chase, a Douglas, a Breckinridge — all 
men of "antecedents," men of "position," of experience 
and training, "safe and sane" men — that they might place 
the fate of the nation in the hands of an ungainly country 
la^wyer from Sangamon county. 

And it was more than the fate of a nation that Abraham 
Lincoln held in his hands during the dark days of the '60 's. 
It was the fate of Democracy. Popular government was 
on trial. More was involved than the division of this coun- 
try into two republics. ]\Iore was involved than the freedom 
of the black man. Human liberty was at stake. Serfdom 
knows no race nor color. It rests on might. It wafi but a 
step from the enslaving of the African to the bondage of 
the poor white — indeed, the most radical supporters of the 
institution did not hesitate to proclaim the dogma "that 



THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE 543 

slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to do with 
difference of complexion," The final issue was the mo- 
mentous question of self-government. Deep in my heart 
I believe that Abraham Lincoln was just as surely raised 
by the hand of Providence to preserve this nation and to 
perpetuate a free government as that Moses was called by 
God to lead his people out of the house of bondage. We 
can account for Lincoln — we can explain Lincoln — only by 
admitting that he was a man sent of God ! 

His calm, impartial, judicial temperament; his infinite 
patience; his kindliness; his compassion; his utter lack of 
egotism and self-assertion; his unselfishness; his supreme 
and sublime faith in the right-mindedness of the people 
and in the justice of their final judgments — these were the 
special endo\\inents, the gifts from Heaven, which fitted 
him for the gigantic burdens laid upon his shoulders. 

The world owes much to Lincoln ; but in my opinion, all 
that he accomplished, all that he gave to struggling hu- 
manity, sprang from his deep-rooted belief in the common 
people ; his faith in the ability of men to govern them- 
selves; and his passionate devotion to the cause of justice 
and fair-dealing between men. 

Today we do honor to the name and the memory of the 
man who with God-like patience, stood calm and unmoved 
amid storms of abuse and vilification, and with firmness 
in the right, saved a great nation from anarchy, liberated 
a race of human beings and established forever the prin- 
ciple of government of the people, for the people, by the 
people. 

But the tribute we pay to that great soul is meaningless 
lip-service, is cant and hypocrisy, unless we renew our 
faith in the fundamental principles of democracy for 
which Lincoln stood — our faith, not only in the rights of 
the people, but in the ability of the people to see and to 
know and to do the right. 

And that, my friends, is the most difficult thing in the 
world, for the average man to acquire — faith in the good 



544 LINCOLN AND HUMAN WELFARE 

sense, the honesty and the ability of the common people. 
Let a man fall heir to a few thousand dollars ; let a sudden 
growth of the town enhance his little property ten-fold; 
let him make a lucky speculation; and he immediately 
begins to think that he is made of finer clay than his less 
fortunate neighbors, and really believes that he deserves 
special privilege and better treatment at the hands of an 
admiring world. He begins to talk about "the hoi-polloi" 
and "the working classes." He will tell you that a man 
gets in this world all that he deserves and that the common 
people have more rights than are good for them. And he 
is always particularly indignant because "it's getting so 
a man can't run his own business without interference 
from meddlesome, busy-body demagogues in the legislature 
and outrageous dictation from tyrannical labor unions." 
And it's surprising how few dollars difference it takes, 
sometimes, to bring about this change in attitude. 

"Well, Abraham Lincoln never acquired that state of 
mind. More and more he trusted the great heart of the 
people — and especially "the common people." The opposi- 
tion to him, the vilification and abuse heaped upon him, 
came for the most part from those who held themselves to 
be greatly his superior in intellect and social position. The 
common people trusted him as he trusted them. 

And this question of the common sense of the common 
people, is in reality, at the bottom of the awful war into 
which German autocracy has plunged the world. It is not 
altogether greed and lust of power that actuate the Ger- 
man junkers. Along with their ravenous disposition to 
get and to hold, goes a supercilious vanity which regards 
the common herd as so many swine — the scum of the earth, 
whose lack of intellect and culture makes them unfit to be 
other than hewers of wood and drawers of water. They 
are no better than the beasts of the field and they deserve 
no better treatment. 

This is the one great issue involved in this horrible war. 
Shall the human race work out its own salvation with lib- 



BUILDING A STATE 545 

erty of conscience and freedom of action, or shall it be 
swept back into a serfdom, debasing, degradinp:, and stif- 
ling to all aspiration? Shall the human family govern 
itself, or shall it be ruled by a merciless, cruel utocracy 
which despises man and laughs at the Almighty? Shall 
man go forward to his destiny, a free creature, or shall he 
become a victim and tool of a horrible Super-man, inhuman 
in his cruelty, vanity and greed? 

There is but one answer for Americans. We would be 
unworthy to call ourselves countrymen of Lincoln, un- 
worthy to stand uncovered before that statue we unveiled 
today, if our answer had been other than that which we 
have given. We believe in democracy; believe in it with 
a faith that stakes our lives, our treasure and our very 
existence as a nation upon its ultimate triumph thruout 
the world. And we are willing to sacrifice, and sacrifice, 
and sacrifice again, to stay the imperious hands that would 
destroy it. 

The problems of civilization are unending. No sooner 
is one solved than a dozen new ones, more complex and 
intricate, confront us. The civilized world, five short years 
ago, fattening in materialistic security, thought that dem- 
ocracy was in the ascendency. We talked of "the brother- 
hood of man," little dreaming that a foe as merciless as 
Satan himself was planning and scheming and intriguing, 
by fair means and foul, to seize the world in a mad-man's 
grasp and throttle the aspirations of the human race. 
There is no folly so great as to think, as a type of mind 
does think, that all our problems are settled, that all we 
have to do now is to let things work themselves out auto- 
matically. No problems are ever "settled." No achieve- 
ment, personal or collective, is ever final. Every piece of 
work done, every new political institution, every i50cial or 
moral reform achieved, is simply a vantage point for the 
accomplishment of something greater and nobler. 

"Civilization is a moving tide." It is a joyous journey 
if we undertake it in the spirit of the "glorious com- 



546 LINCOLN AND HUMAN WELFARE 

pany" of those who have made the world what it is today. 
To be afraid of the present or the future is cowardice. Not 
to go forward is no better than to turn our backs and run. 
It is still true, as it was stated to be in the parable of the 
Great Teacher, that the reward for work well done is not 
ease and leisure, but the reward is more work, more re- 
sponsibility. He that ruled one city successfully was in 
the parable given ten cities to rule over. And you and I 
are not true men and women if we do not see that this is 
after all and always the greatest, most blessed of all re- 
wards. 

And we in Kansas are just well started on the task of 
building a state. The history of the state has not yet 
spanned the life of the man who reaches the Biblical allot- 
ment of three score years and ten. The forces of good 
must be unresting, for, depend upon it, the forces of evil 
will not rest. The worst possible peril for the individual, 
the Church or the state is to be satisfied with work done, 
to feel that all the problems are solved. That is the gre:it- 
est danger of all dangers. The times of real peril to a 
state and a nation never have been, as you and I very well 
know, the pioneering d ys, of fighting savage enemies, of 
grappling with the wilderness, the d ys of poverty. The 
real danger threatens when riches increase and our hearts 
become set upon them, when luxury comes to ste ,1 away 
our physical, mental and moral vigor and fibre. 

So, even on the m iterial side we have not arrived at a 
real solution of our problem. We have create 1 enormous 
wealth in this country and we tUk of prosperity. We talk 
sometimes as tho increasing we '1th means decreasing 
poverty. No one knows better than you that it doc^s not 
mean that in this country and it never has meant that in 
any country. The richest cities have, and always have 
had, the most dire and degrading poverty. It ought not 
to be so. Believing that every wrong has a remedy, I do 
not believe it is necessarily so, nor that it alw-iys will be 
so. I only say that it always has been so, is still so, and 



THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN 547 

that no political nor industrial economy founded upon 
anything but brotherhood, upon those Abraham Lincoln. 
principles which draw men's hearts together, ever can 
solve this baffling difficulty. 

There must be no backward step taken at this time. 
Laboring men and labor organizations are willing and 
must be willing to make sacrifices that we may win the 
war; but it is not necessary for labor to sacrifice principle 
any more than it is necessary for the Church to give up 
the eternal principles upon which it is founded. ' Labor is 
willing to do its part; but it will not agree that the war 
be made an excuse for the overturning and sweeping aside 
of what it has won by years of patient striving. It will 
not agree to the importation of coolie labor or cheap Porto 
Rican labor to displace American labor; it will not agree 
to the breaking of child-labor laws, of the eight-hour day 
laws, nor to the ignoring, in the alleged interest of speed 
and increased production, of any of the fundamental things 
that it has won for humanity. 

I am not here to speak in a spirit of pessimism nor of 
fault-finding. I would not for one moment have you think 
that things are hopelessly wrong, despite the awful holo- 
caust in which we are involved. Indeed, I am happy in 
the belief that the world really grows better from age to 
age. Otherwise, I should not have the faith and courage 
to face my little part in the battle against autocracy. I 
have the courage to help save the world, because the world 
is worth saving. Outside of junker-ridden Germany, the 
world is nearer the long-sought Brotherhood of Man than 
ever before. The hour of trial that has come to us — the 
testing fire thru which we are passing — has revealed our 
true selves to ourselves ; and while there are those so craven 
as to be willing to fatten upon their coimtry's necessity, 
men dominated by greed instead of conscience, the great 



548 LINCOLN AND HUMAN WELFARE 

heart of America has beaten with patriotic fervor, and as a 
people we have said: "Here am I, what wilt thou have 
me do?" 

The war already has brought home to us, as years of 
preaching and agitation could not have done, the great 
fundamental fact of the interdependence of all members 
of society. Stern necessity is making us realize what we 
individually owe to society as a whole. A young man 
shoulders a rifle and marches away to the trenches; not 
to win fame and glory; not for booty or loot, but because 
his country needs him and his service. We all recognize 
that call of duty. If it is imperative in time of war, is 
that duty of service to the common good less imperative in 
time of peace? 

Society allows a man to occupy a piece of land — not pri- 
marily that he may grow rich from its products — but that 
he may serve society by helping to feed and clothe it. A 
man is allowed to operate a mine or an oil-field or a rail- 
way system, or a bank or a factory or a store or a news- 
paper, not necessarily to enable him to gouge the public, 
but to serve the public. A man learns a trade or goes out 
to do some useful work as a laborer, not merely to keep 
soul and body together, but to play the part of a man, to 
do his share of the world's work, to help make the world 
a better, a happier place in which to live. 

The war, I say, is making us — some of us at least — to 
see this. We are learning that every man has his part to 
perform. 

The man who wins battles in time of war, the man who 
preserves order in time of public excitement, the man who 
always marches in the vanguard of human progress, is the 
man in the ranks. He is the man the world needs. In 
every walk of life, it is the common man, the man of sense, 
judgment, principle, good moral fibre and physical stam- 
ina, that the world needs in every avenue of progress and 
achievement, and in every crisis. It is our great good for- 



THE BACKBONE OF THE COUNTRY 549 

tune in America that he is not so uncommon nor so scarce, 
as are captains, colonels and generals as worthy as he is. 

Nowadays we seem to be teaching and preaching and 
emphasizing everywhere, that it is the generals and the 
colonels that do all the fighting. Instead we ought to teach 
in every home and every school in the land, that however 
humble a man's station may be, if he does his duty faith- 
fully, industriously and well in that place, he is as great 
a man and as worthy of the world's honor and respect as 
princes, kings or Presidents. 

Tn the army of life, it is the men and women who do 
their daily tasks, be they great or small, without sniveling, 
without complaining that fate 'is hard upon them, without 
trying to jump into a high position before they are ready 
for it, or the call comes, who really keep the world moving 
forward in its course toward better things. It is they who 
are the backbone of the country. It is commendable to 
wish to get ahead in the world; to win positions of trust 
and confidence; to amount to something in life; but we 
must not forget that the world's work is really done by 
what we sometimes call the "common people." It is the 
rank and file that bear the brunt of the battle. All honor 
to them. We owe them much. 

I should rather be a Kansas farmer raising wheat and 
corn and doing my part in feeding the world, than to be 
the richest grain gambler in Chicago, than the man who 
makes a million by putting up the price of bread to the 
city's poor. I should rather be the village blacksmith who 
knows how to put a good shoe on a farmer's horse than to 
be the munitions manufacturer who has grown rich on 
blood money. I should rather be a private in the ranks of 
life, an humble citizen with my family around my fireside, 
than a king of finance who gains his wealth and position 
by unscrupulous methods. I know there are rich men who 
are good men and true, but the mad desire for wealth, the 
increasing dissatisfaction with the simple life and wdth 
simple wholesome living, the desire to get rich quick, which 



550 LINCOLN AND HUMAN WELFARE 

has been so prevalent in this country during the last twenty 
years, unless it is curbed will surely destroy the moral fiber 
of our people and bring this nation to ruin. 

We need more men to volunteer as privates. There the 
real service and the real honor lie. Compared to it much, 
if not all else, is mere sham and glitter, flash and noise. 

I believe in America. I believe in the ultimate triumph 
of right and justice. I believe in the ideals of the Amer- 
ican people in whom Abraham Lincoln placed such great 
confidence. I believe in God's providence we are slowly, 
and oftentimes with faltering steps, but none the less surely, 
advancing toward the Brotherhood of Man. We do not 
always see things in the same_ light. We can 't always agree 
as to ways and means, but I am happy in the belief that 
the conscience of the good people of America is more acute 
today than ever before in our history. I know we have 
high ideals and that as individuals we are more ready than 
ever before to make sacrifices for the common welfare ; that 
slowly but surely we are coming a little nearer to the ideals 
of Him who gave His life for us. May God help us to do 
our part to maintain these ideals, to keep our hands clean, 
to set our faces toward the right, so to contribute our share 
toward the redemption of mankind, to bring it into the 
happiness and well-being of its divine inheritance. 



FOR A BETTER RACE IN A BETTER WORLD. 

From an Address Delivered at Public Welfare Meeting, 
Bonner Springs, Kan., October 17, 1915. 

The w^iole spirit of the advancing, helpful age in which 
we live is to save rather than to destroy, to redeem rather 
than to degrade. This crusade for clean and wholesome 
living is one of the most impelling movements of our day. 

The welfare problem you are trying to solve can be solved 



FOR A BETTER RACE 551 

only thru education at home, at school, at church, 
thru such meetings as this. It is not simply a problem 
of today; it is a problem of every day. It will be with 
humanity so long as children are born and reared. For 
that reason the good citizen of the community must bear 
his share of the burdens of working out an effective method 
by which the successive generations of children shall be 
trained to a saner and happier living. 

A worthless man is he who attends simply to his business 
and has no care for the public welfare. He does not rise 
above self-interest. He wants to get the most out of the 
community without giving anything in return. Hundreds 
of such men in Bonner Springs, as in every city, would be 
surprised and insulted if they heard themselves spoken of 
as not being good citizens, and yet they never help to rip-ht 
a wrong ; so far as they are concerned the city may go into 
moral bankruptcy. 



A LAW TO HELP MOTHERS. 

From an Address Delivered at Westminster Congregational 
Church, Kansas City, Mo., Decemher 2, 1917. 

Probably the most truly helpful, the most wisely humane 
and philanthropic law we have in our Kansas statute book, 
is the new so-called mothers' pension act. What this 
mothers' compensation law is doing to give semi-orphaned 
children a home and a mother's care — defective as that 
law is in its present state — is illustrated by this extract 
from a letter I have received recently : 

*'I am writing to tell you," says this mother, ''how 
much my sister and I appreciate our pensions. We now 
are receiving our $10 a month. We each have two chil- 
dren. It was necessary for us to leave two of them in our 
father's home, that we might work and earn enough to 



552 A LAW TO HELP MOTHERS 

clothe and feed them and ourselves. The pension, how- 
ever, is like so much manna from heaven as now we can 
have our babies at home with us. May God bless our state 
for passing a bill that will enable the mothers of Kansas 
to bring their children up under their o\v^l care and pro- 
tection. My hope is that the new law may be a means of 
bringing forth a boyhood and a girlhood Kansas will be 
proud to own." 

To cite another case : A widow with five children in 
Wyandotte county, was earning $40 a month cleaning Pull- 
man cars. To do this she was obliged to let the eldest girl, 
age 11 years, be the little mother of the family all day. 
This woman recently has been granted a widow's pension 
of $10 a month. With this and the washings she has now 
found to do at home, she is enabled to support her family 
and give her children a mother's loving care and constant 
oversight. Those children and that home have been saved 
from inevitable shipwreck; that pitifully self-sacrificing, 
over-burdened little mother of 11 years will now know 
something of the joys of childhood ; and the chances are 100 
per cent better that the boys and girls in this family will 
become good citizens, instead of failures. They are not so 
likely to become a charge upon the county or the state far 
exceeding the expense of the county's present investment 
in their behalf. 

The new Kansas law is assisting about sixty-five ^\ddows 
in this way in Wyandotte, our most populous county, one 
with eleven children. You can imagine what a godsend 
it must be to that mother of eleven and her brood. 

Isn 't this a far better, a far wiser, a far more economical 
and a much more humane way than parting mother and 
children to send them motherless to an orphanage, or than 
to let them run wild, with no parental care, possibly, if not 
probably, to become victims of neglect, inmates of prisons 
and a charge for life on the county or the state? 

And are mothers to be considered as rendering no service 



SOMETHING NEW FOR KANSAS 553 

to the state in the upbringing and rearing of its future 
citizens? In fact, is there anything more important than 
the well-being of American homes? 



SANITATION AS A FACTOR IN COMMUNITY 
UPLIFT. 

From an Address at Fredonia, Kan., on Sanitation Day, 
Octoher 5, 1915, 

If this is not a "momentous occasion" — the kind which 
orators are so fond of acclaiming — it is at least an unique 
event in the history of mankind. Certainly it is something 
new for the state of Kansas, and I suspect new to the na- 
tion. When before have the representatives of a national 
government, the representatives of a state, and the most 
representative citizens of a county gathered together to 
celebrate a general house-cleaning? 

To be sure there have been in times past, jollifications 
and jubilees over a "clean-up" at election times. When- 
ever we have "turned the rascals out" we have celebrated 
with much red fire, and many loud whoops of joyful noise. 
The male portion of the population has always heaved a 
sigh of relief — and sometimes celebrated in other ways — 
when the annual or semi-annual spasm of house-cleaning 
has been completed in the individual domicile — but never 
before have I known of a whole county getting together to 
acclaim the glad fact that they have learned something 
about how to battle with dirt. 

I congratulate the good people of Fredonia and Wilson 
county that this practical demonstration in the science of 
sanitation is given here. I don't know how it happens that 
Wilson county was selected, but from what I know of Wil- 
son county folks, I am sure that no county in the United 



554 COMMUNITY SANITATION 

States could have been found whose people are more alert, 
more ready to welcome new ideas and more keenly inter- 
ested in all that makes for the betterment of general con- 
ditions. 

"We have reason to be proud of the place that Kansas 
has taken in the fight against preventable disease. The 
secretary of our state board of health is not only himself 
a figure of national importance and international reputa- 
tion, but many of the reforms he has instituted, many of 
the precautionary measures he has promoted to safeguard 
the public health, have — after a period of opposition and 
sometimes of ridicule — been adopted by all of the more 
progressive states of the nation. Kansas has led the way 
in several health movements of vital importance. 

It is difficult for us laymen to comprehend the appalling 
number of deaths due to causes absolutely preventable, and 
it is equally difficult for us — unless we have made a spe- 
cial study of the subject — to appreciate the strides that 
have been made in the prevention of disease by the science 
of sanitation — by striking at the roots ; the removal of its 
cause and the prevention of its spread. It is to this work 
that the public health officials are directing their energies, 
and it is of this work that the Wilson county campaign 
is a demonstration. 

Some sage — Mohammed if I remember — said "Cleanli- 
ness is next to Godliness. ' ' I know I used to have to write 
it over and over again in my copy-book at school when I 
was about ten years old. I had to write it so many times 
that I began to hate the man who first said it. A wiser 
man — an American I think — amended the maxim: "Clean- 
liness is not next to Godliness ; it is Godliness ! ' ' And if 
Godliness means right-living, the American amendment is 
right. Cleanliness is Godliness, and I hardly see how there 
can be Godliness without it. Filth of mind or body is sin- 
ful, and brings its punishment as certainly in one case as 
the other. There is no longer any room for argument about 
the cause — the source of the great majority of disease; 



FACTORS IN SOCIAL UPLIFT 555 

there is and I suppose always will be argument about the 
particular method of treatment that is most efficacious 
after disease once fastens itself upon the human system, 
but there can be little question about the method of pre- 
venting many of the diseases which lay such heavy toll 
upon our people. To shut our eyes to the facts which con- 
front us; to refuse to take the precautionary measures 
which the occasion demands; to remain indifferent and 
negligent is criminal. It is the part of the good citizen not 
only to protect his own health, but to do everything pos 
sible to protect the health of his community. And it is the 
business of the state to see that the individual does this. 
This is the theory upon which all public health measures 
rest ; it is the idea of society protecting itself against the 
ignorance, the carelessness, the indifference of the individ- 
ual. The idea is fundamental and as old as human gov- 
ernment : Nowhere do we find more sanitary measures 
than in the Mosaic law of the Old Testament, but in the 
modern application of it, it is new. The majority of us, 
unfamiliar with the new discoveries that science makes 
daily (often overturning and discarding the dead certain- 
ties of yesterday) do not always understand the necessity 
and importance of some of the rulings of the men to whom 
we entrust the health of our communities. Sometimes we 
are inclined to look upon them as fads, as arbitrary whims, 
as the queer quirks of cranky minds entrusted with a little 
authority. This attitude of the public mind— not alto- 
gether unnatural in all the circumstances, calls for two 
things : 

First — education — explanation — enlightenment. Show 
the Kansas citizen why — and he is willing to comply. For- 
tunately this is being done. Dr. Crumbine and his en- 
thusiastic staff are more concerned in educating the people 
of Kansas, in preaching the gospel of public health, than 
they are in bringing obstinate lawbreakers to punishment. 
They are a gospel army of preachers of the whys and 
wherefores. I sometimes think that if they had their way, 



556 COMMUNITY SANITATION 

they would monopolize the entire state printing plant and 
run it overtime getting out literature showing us how to 
live so long that we'd make old Methuselah look like a 
new-born babe. And the national government, thru 
bulletins and lectures and surveys and demonstrations — 
thru just such work as has been done here in Wilson 
county — is carrying on the work of education and en- 
lightenment. The purpose — and it will be accomplished 
— is to make the rules of safety and good health, the re- 
strictions which now seem so obnoxious to some of us, sec- 
ond nature to the next generation. 

The other thing which I think highly essential to progress 
and permanent success in public regulation, is the most 
careful avoidance on the part of public health officers of 
all bigotry, all fads, all untried experiments. One pig- 
headed theorist, one over-zealous enthusiast who lacks that 
saving sanity and tolerance which must accompany all 
work of this kind, can undo in a day the efforts of forty 
good men. We cannot afford to make mistakes. We can- 
not get too far ahead of public sentiment. We must edu- 
cate as we regulate. 

I am glad that this sanitary survey has been made in 
Kansas. It will be an object lesson that will not be lost 
upon the whole state. It is in line with the growing de- 
mand for consideration by the state of the interests of the 
people as a whole. It is in keeping with the best sentiment 
of our day which places the man above the dollar and 
human life above money. 



A PLEA FOR WORLD PEACE. 

From an Address at the Kansas Peace Conference, Repre- 
sentative Hall, Topeka, February 12, 1915. 

We have gathered today under the shadow of the world's 
greatest tragedy. War is crucifying the noblest civiliza- 
tion of Europe and a blood lust stirs the world. Thru 



A RELIC OF BARBARISM 557 

long ages man has groped his way from darkest barbarism 
to light, but from civilization to barbarism is a single step 
downward. War, the destroyer, can undo the work of cen- 
turies in a day and plunge the world in woe. 

We, in Kansas, far removed from this world-catastrophe, 
go about our peaceful pursuits with no true realization of 
the awful deluge of blood which has engulfed the greater 
part of civilization. Yet, we know something of war. Some 
of us have heard the barbaric yell of the savage. Many 
of us have felt the inhuman passion of fraternal strife; 
have heard the funeral roll of the drum which beats the 
soldier's last tattoo; have seen the slow march; have lis- 
tened to that supremely mournful, grief-expressing last 
call — the bugles sounding taps." 

The cry of the war-stricken widow, the weeping of or- 
phans, the heart-broken sobbing of bereaved mothers, is 
not unknown to us. We know the want, the woe, the mis- 
ery, the desolation, that war brings in its train. Rapine 
and pillage, carnage and blood — we know; but we know 
them as words — mere words, while millions of our fellow 
beings know them today as unspeakable, crushing actuali- 
ties which leave the survivor stunned, dazed, helpless, hope- 
less, to begin life anew in an unknown and utterly un- 
familiar world. 

We, the thrice-blest people of Kansas, cannot realize the 
awfulness of this world-wide war. We know it only by 
hearsay and from afar. But, we know if our Christian 
civilization is to endure, if the human race is not to retro- 
grade to a state of savagery, if we are not to lose all that 
we have gained thru the slow centuries of progress, this 
war of 1914-15 must be the last war that arraigns the intel- 
ligence, the sanity, the humanity of mankind. War must 
cease. Its continuance is unthinkable. And, while none 
of us here plays a part in the counsels of the world which 
decree war, every one of us has a responsibility to God 
and man, which calls for a determined stand against the 
great iniquity. We can, as private individuals, do some- 



558 A PLEA FOR WORLD PEACE 

thing to aid the great and holy movement for a permanent 
world-peace. God help us not only to see the right but to 
do our full duty at all times and in all places. 

With few exceptions, the thinking men and women of 
the civilized world agree that war is a relic of barbarism 
which should be impossible as a policy of modern nations 
or in a Christian civilization. The cruelty of war; the 
wickedness of war ; the economic waste of war ; the absurd- 
ity of war, is universally admitted. But the world 's states- 
men, either obsessed by an ancient superstition or craftily 
wicked in the hope of some possible advantage to them- 
selves or to their country, seem unable or unwilling to abol- 
ish the crude custom of the Dark Ages of settling disputes 
with fire and sword. They realize that they live today in 
a new world, a world transformed in the last one hundred 
years ; a world knit together by the telegraph and the wire- 
less ; a world made one country by quick transportation fa- 
cilities and world-wide commercial enterprises; a world 
physically re-created in a century by science, invention and 
commerce ; and intellectually made over by the wide dissemi- 
nation of intelligence and the inculcation of the spirit of 
liberty and brotherhood in the hearts of all men. Thoy 
know that in every line of human endeavor the world has 
made progress, but they still insist in applying to interna- 
tional disputes a method employed by the savages of the 
Stone Age; they admit no progress; they accept no new 
ideals. 

I am more and more convinced, my friends, that we can- 
not depend upon those in high places to relieve the world 
of this unspeakable woe. The rulers of the earth are blind 
worshipers of the past. Their places and their authority 
depend upon ancient traditions. We cannot expect them 
to set their faces toward the light. They are surrounded 
in most countries by a military caste tliat looks upon war 
as the end and aim of life and the glory of the soldier as 
the highest ideal of human existence. Around this caste 
of professional militarism is a large body of enterprising, 



MEN WHO PROMOTE WAR 559 

shrewd, and I fear, often unscrupulous commercial men 
who thrive and grow fat by providing the sinews of war. 
King, general, banker, cannon-maker — these men in high 
places, what else can we expect of them? 

War will cease only when the people of the earth — the 
common people — determine in their hearts and minds that 
war shall be no more. 

This reform, this great step in human progress, must 
first have its birth, its growth, its blossoming, its frui- 
tion in the hearts and minds of the people — such as have 
gathered here today. War will cease when the men and 
the women of the world who bear the brunt of war, who 
shed their blood, who pay the taxes, who send their sons 
to the battlefields, say that war shall be no more. 

And, it is to further that demand that we have come 
here today — to do our part in creating and enlisting pub- 
lic opinion in this country — to do our part in extending 
the peace sentiment thruout the world. 

Our national body politic rests upon the idea that all 
governments derive their just powers from the consent of 
the governed. My friends, this is true, not only in Amer- 
ica, but thruout the world. The most autocratic gov- 
ernment that ever existed derived its powers, just or un- 
just, from the Avilling or unwilling consent of the people. 
And so war exists by the consent of the common people. 
Grudgingly and unwillingly men give their consent, after 
being appealed to by false patriotism, by the glamour of 
a sham glory, by coercion and fraud, but none the less with 
the consent of the people. No war can be waged success- 
fully without the support of public opinion, and upon us 
who abhor and clearly and dispassionately see the useless- 
ness, the horror and violence of this bloodshed, rests the 
responsibility of bringing the world to see the absurdity 
and wickedness of modern warfare. 

I do not imagine that we people of Kansas shall be able 
to set the thrones of Europe quaking. I do not imagine 
that the military caste, so strong in almost every modern 



560 A PLEA FOR WORLD PEACE 

nation, will give much heed to what we say and do here 
today. I presume many persons will sweep aside our 
deliberations with the one word " Sentimentalism. " But 
firm in the belief of the righteousness of this cause ; strong 
in the faith that right is right so long as God is in His 
Heaven, I know that every effort we make to bring about 
that "Peace on earth and good will toward men" pro- 
claimed by the angelic hosts two thousand years ago will, 
like the soul of John Brown, go marching on to a bloodless 
and a glorious victory. 

We have not met here as sentimentalists. If there were 
in our hearts not the least compassion, if we did not look 
with horror upon the shedding of human blood, if we had 
no regard for the loss of strong young men, if we did not 
feel the heart-break of mothers and wives, we, still, from 
a purely economic, dollars-and-cents point of view would 
protest against a continuance of this world-old folly. 

Putting the question on its very lowest basis, looking at 
it from a purely material point of view, war accomplishes 
nothing which could not be accomplished in a sane and 
Christian manner, and its cost in dollars and cents is far 
beyond all compensation. The nations of Europe are ex- 
pending a million dollars every thirty minutes. They are 
slaughtering human beings at the rate of a million men a 
year; they are wiping out the production of centuries of 
progress, entailing a loss upon the world which no gain of 
territory can ever replace. Our protest is not sentimental, 
altho we thank God that we are moved by human suf- 
fering and by waste of human life. 

This meeting has been called merely that the good peo- 
ple of Kansas might have opportunity for registering their 
protest against the lapse into barbarism which will for all 
time disgrace the Twentieth Century of the Christian Era; 
and that we might prayerfully and thoughtfully consider 
ways and means whereby a recurrence of this world-wide 
catastrophe may be made impossible, whereby the world's 



THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE 561 

people may dwell together in peace and unity. We are 
here to prepare for and to promote a peace which I hope 
shall be as enduring as eternity. Let us lipeed the day. 



WAR'S ONLY JUSTIFICATION. 

From a Memorial Day Speech at Wilson, Kan., May 29, 1915. 

The flag, Abraham Lincoln and the American people, 
stand for the only thing for which war ever can be justi- 
fied — the right of every human being to life, liberty and 
the pursuit of happiness. In this we stand the spokesmen 
of humanity in the present world conflict. As a nation 
this is the vital principle of our national life, the very 
essence of our national honor, our covenant as a people 
with God. We are bound to keep it and to demand that 
others respect it. We are bound to follow it as we have 
and always will follow it wherever it leads. This is what 
the flag, in all its symbolism and beauty means to us ; what 
America and Americans mean to the world. 

To this enlightened creed we, as Westerners and Kan- 
sans, are and always have been committed. 

As a people we are not for war. This nation never has 
been the aggressor in beginning a war- 

It never has taken up the sword except when all other 
measures, then known to men, have failed. 

It never has waged a war of aggrandizement. Historians 
now find ample justification for our war with Mexico, the 
only American war in which the divine principle of human 
rights did not far outweigh all other causes. 

No other nation known to history ever has been so slow 
to anger, so loth to shed blood; so patient, so long-suffer- 
ing, so level-headed under wrong, insult and aggression; 



562 WAR'S ONLY JUSTIFICATION 

nor when it must fight, so powerful and all-prevailing in 
self-defense. 

No other ever and always has treated a fallen foe so 
generously, so kindly, no nobly. 

If ever a nation may be said to be a Christian nation — 
judged by its war history — this nation may claim to be, 
and its conduct in this dark and evil year when a blood 
lust blinds the world with passion, is in line with the high- 
est and the noblest of its traditions. 

My friends, in this epochal, crucial year, we as a nation 
in common with all other nations, are being tried in the 
balance. God has given us the most glorious mission that 
ever came to a nation since Time began — the mission and 
the opportunity to encompass the downfall and extinction 
of war; to bring about the rise — o'er all the world — of the 
light of reason and the Reign of Law. 

Sooner or later this is coming. In this day and hour, 
on us more than on any other nation rests this mighty re- 
sponsibility, that this vast and cruel war, this appalling 
sacrifice of human life and happiness, shall not have been 
in vain. Nothing else can ever justify it. 

I believe this great, free nation is, to its undying glory, 
to be the instrument which shall bring about the end of 
warfare, of murder, as a means of settling the disputes of 
nations. 

The great issue which dominates this world Avar, is not 
the cause for which the warring nations believe themselves 
to be fighting. It is not whether Alsace or Lorraine shall 
return to France, nor that unhappy, war-riven, starving 
Belgium shall be restored to peace and plenty, nor that 
Germany or England shall take the higher place in the 
sun. The true issue, the final outcome, is either to be the 
crushing-out of militarism, the annihilation of war; or a 
whole world armed to the teeth, every nation mistrusting 
and plotting against another, the absolute certainty of 
more fearful world-wars, wars involving the whole of 
humanity — until man, so-called intelligent man, with his 



STOP ORGANIZED MURDER 563 

God-given powers of reason, can be made to see the utter 
futility, the utter insanity, the appalling waste and wicked- 
ness of organized murder, as a means of settling the dis- 
putes of nations. Until he does, this blood and suffering 
is upon his own head, a fitting punishment for his bar- 
barity and wickedness, 

God forbid that there shall be a continuation of this vast 
wickedness and folly. 

By the faith that is in us, I hope humanity never again 
shall tread the fiery furnace of war; that w^e as Americans 
shall rise to our glorious opportunity, and that the Amer- 
ican flag shall usher in that era of peace and good will 
among the nations which seems so just and reasonable — 
that at least there shall be no more war. 

Then on this day, sacred to the memory of American 
valor and human sacrifice, let us again dedicate and con- 
secrate ourselves to the cause of humanity, justice and 
peace, that these great blessings shall come to a war-w'eary 
world and abide forevermore. 



WHEN WAR WILL. CEASE. 

From an Address to the Congregation of the Wichita M. E. 
Church, Patriotic Day, July 4, 1915. 

We, the thrice-blest people of Kansas, cannot realize the 
awfulness of this world-wide war. We know it only by 
hearsay and from afar. But, we do know if our Christian 
civilization is to endure, if the human race is not to retro- 
grade to a state of savagery, if we are not to lose all that 
we have gained thru the slow centuries of progress, 
this war of 1914-1915 must be the last war that arraigns 
the intelligence, the sanity, the humanity of mankind. And, 
while none of us here plays a part in the counsels of the 



564 WHEN WAR WILL CEASE 

world which decree war, every one of us has a responsi- 
bility to God and man, which calls for a determined stand 
against the great iniquity. We can all, as private individ- 
uals, do something to aid the great and holy movement for 
a permanent world-peace. 

By remaining steadfast to its holy principles, future 
generations of its own sons and daughters and countless 
millions of the progeny of Europe saved to posterity, will 
forevermore look upon the star spangled banner as the 
symbol of man's humanity to man. 

I believe in America. I believe in the ultimate triumph 
of right and justice. I believe in the ideals of the Amer- 
ican people in whom Abraham Lincoln placed such great 
confidence. I believe in God's providence we are slowly, 
and oftentimes with faltering steps, but none the less surely, 
advancing toward the Brotherhood of Man. We do not 
always see things in the same light. We can 't always agree 
as to ways and means, but I am happy in the belief that 
the conscience of the good people of Kansas is more acute 
today than ever before in our history. I know we have 
high ideals and that as individuals we are more ready than 
ever before to make sacrifices for the common welfare ; that 
slowly but surely we are coming a little nearer to the ideals 
of Him who gave His life for us. May God help us to do 
our part to maintain these ideals, to keep our hands clean, 
to set our faces toward the right, so to contribute our share 
toward the redemption of mankind, to bring it into the 
happiness and well-being of its divine inheritance. 



OUR DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY AT THE CLOSE 
OF THE WORLD WAR. 

Address at Conference of Governors at Washirigton, D. C, 
December 14-16, 1916. 

Domestic 'problems of vital consequence and importance 
will confront the American people at the close of the Eu- 
ropean war. Many of them can be foreseen and prepared 
for. Others perhaps now undreamed of, will arise to test 
the statesmanship of our leaders and the patriotism of our 
people. Economic conditions in the United States will 
change. The duration of the war; the final outcome; the 
terms of peace; the vitality left in the contending nations 
and their powers of recuperation, all will affect, in one 
way or other, the commerce, the industry, the financial 
condition of this country, and the national life of our peo- 
ple. The question of tariffs, the problem of immigration, 
the maintenance and extension of our foreign markets, our 
fiscal problem, will engage our most serious attention. But 
above all our domestic problems will loom the great re- 
sponsibility that America owes to our own people no less 
than to the world, of establishing among the nations of the 
earth a permanent peace that never again shall be broken 
by the insanity of war and the deformity of militarism. 

One need be neither a believer in the red-blood school of 
philosophy which defies brute force, nor a namby-pamby 
sentimentalist, to hold the belief that in the end some good 
to humanity will result from the hell that is now devastat- 
ing so large a part of the civilized world. 

Whether we look upon this war as inevitable — the prod- 
uct of irresistible tendencies — or consider it as the result 
of the deliberate machinations of scheming rulers crazed 

565 



566 OUR DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY 

by lust for power, it is the duty of the sane men of the 
world to make this world tragedy, which now seems to 
many of us to have set back the clock of civilization a thou- 
sand years, the marker of a new epoch in human progress. 
Humanity must gather up the fragments of the wreck and 
must begin the work of reconstruction upon a greater plan 
and with a higher purpose than any plan with which the 
world has ever built. 

America by good luck, or by the grace of God, or by wise 
statesmanship, as you will, has up to the present time ''kept 
out of war"; but our interest in its consequences is none 
the less on that account; and our duty and responsibility 
is all the greater. All the greater, too, because we are not 
entirely spotless ; our hands are not wholly clean. "We have 
pursued the safe course — and have filled our coffers in the 
meantime. We have fattened on the blood of the battle- 
field. Our farms have been depleted of horses; our grain 
has sold at war-time prices ; our factories have worked over- 
time making munitions and our speculators have fattened 
upon "war-babies." The people of the United States, for 
all our neutrality, have participated most actively in the 
World War ; and we cannot evade our responsibility at its 
close. 

In the natural trend of events it is highly probable that 
the United States government will have a voice in the 
negotiations of peace upon the cessation of hostilities. To 
be in position to participate in a conference of such tran- 
scendent importance it is vital that this government and 
this people maintain an open mind, and observe in advance 
the most impartial neutrality. It is not for us now to 
begin dictating the details of terms of peace; we must not 
prejudge a cause which we may later be called upon to 
adjudicate. But certain principles are fundamental and 
may be discussed without prejudice to our standing as 
arbitrators. Foremost among these is the principle of a 
permanent peace. Better that this war with all its un- 
speakable frightfulness and suffering should continue for 



THE HATRED OF BATTLE 567 

years than that it should end with an inconclusive peace — 
in an armed truce, with the contending nations nursing 
their old animosities and ready to resume hostilities upon 
the first provocation or excuse. 

Upon the American people rests the responsibility and 
duty of leadership in the movement for permanent peace 
among civilized nations. And the duty is not wholly altru- 
istic. It is no Quixotic enterprise to which we are called. 
We are not meddlers in the affairs of others when we say 
that war must cease. The interdependence of nations; the 
bonds of commerce and finance, entirely aside from the 
dictates of common humanity, make it impossible for this 
plague of war to exist anywhere upon the globe without 
seriously affecting both our international relations and our 
domestic affairs. We can no more rely upon our geograph- 
ical position of isolation as warrant for indifference. We 
cannot therefore be accused of being sentimental when we 
insist that our plea for peace be heard. 

Putting the question on its very lowest basis, looking at 
it from a purely material point of view, war accomplishes 
nothing which could not be accomplished in a sane and 
Christian manner, and its cost in dollars and cents is far 
beyond all computation. The nations of Europe are ex- 
pending a million dollars every thirty minutes. They are 
slaughtering human beings at the rate of a million men a 
year; they are wiping out the production of centuries of 
progress, entailing a loss upon the world which no gain of 
territory ever can replace. Our protest is not sentimental, 
altho we thank God that we are moved by human suffer- 
ing and the waste of human life by this destroying world- 
sickness. 

I believe that this thought is uppermost in the minds of 
the civilized world today. This war has intensified as 
nothing else could have done the hatred of battle and has 
brought home not only to rulers, but — what is of greater 
importance — to the people of the earth, the utter folly, the 
wicked futility, the criminality of a resort to arnjs as a 



568 OUR DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY 

means of settling international disputes. Chancellors and 
premiers and cabinets in the capitols of Europe, who a few 
years ago would have laughed at any plans for permanent 
peace as chimerical schemes of dreamers, are now ready to 
consider with respect any measure that proposes immunity 
from this mad disease. 

With few exceptions, the thinking men and women of 
the world agree that war is a barbarism which should be 
impossible as a policy of modern nations or in a Christian 
civilization. The cruelty of war; the wickedness of war; 
the economic waste of war; the absurdity of war is uni- 
versally admitted. But the world's statesmen, either ob- 
sessed by an ancient superstition or with near-sighted state- 
craft plotting and intriguing for some hoped for advantage 
to themselves or to their country, seem unable or unwilling 
to abolish the crude custom of the Dark Ages of settling 
disputes with fire and sword. They realize that they live 
today in a new world, a world transformed in the last one 
hundred years ; a world knit together by the telegraph and 
the wireless; a world made one country by quick trans- 
portation facilities and world-wide commercial enterprises; 
a world physically re-created in a century by science, in- 
vention and commerce, and intellectually made over by the 
wide dissemination of intelligence and the inculcation of 
the spirit of liberty and brotherhood in the hearts of all 
men. They know that in every avenue of human endeavor 
the world has made progress, but they still insist on apply- 
ing to international disputes a method employed by the 
savages of the Stone Age; they admit no progress; they 
accept no new ideals. There are, it is true, here and there, 
men who profess still to believe in the tonic properties of 
blood-letting ; who profess to think that the doctrine of the 
survival of the fittest implies a struggle of brute force ; but 
such philosophy is held by comparatively few. No man 
can study the history of the evolution of human society 
and fail to see that law must be maintained between na- 
tions as it is between individuals. Absolute sovereignty 



WARS SHOULD BE ABOLISHED 569 

of the various nations is as impossible as absolute sover- 
eignty for the individual. It now amounts to anarchy. 

The close of the World War strikes the hour for the or- 
ganization among civilized nations of an actual federation 
with the purpose of maintaining a world peace. And 
America is the one nation which can propose such a federa- 
tion and effect its organization. We are the nation which 
can best assume the leadership. The task is hopeless with- 
out us. This is because of our non-participation in the 
present struggle and because of the magnitude of the na- 
tion and its resources. We are largest producers of the 
materials from which war munitions are made ; we are in 
a fair way to become the bankers of the world ; our popula- 
tion increases rapidly; our material growth and expansion 
have excited jealousy in certain quarters, so that any effort 
at federation is doomed to failure unless we participate. 
Historically, too, we are committed to the principle of con- 
ciliation. We showed the world as early as 1794, by nego- 
tiation under the Jay Treaty, the possibility of arbitration 
of questions of fundamental importance. Our present posi- 
tion, our historic attitude, to say nothing of the idealism 
which is a part of the American character, demand that we 
take the initiative in this tremendously vital movement. 

And, moreover, as believers in democracy we are bound 
to believe in an inherent sense of justice in the hearts of 
the masses. Down-trodden and sodden as still are too many 
of the "lower classes" of the mighty empires of the earth, 
the leaven of intelligence, of justice, of fair-play is never- 
theless working, and men do not willingly become cannon- 
fodder for a false ideal. It is "God and home and native 
land ' ' for which they are willing to die, and not in a trivial 
quarrel nor to gratify the greed and cupidity of unscrupu- 
lous rulers. The most autocratic government that ever 
existed derived its powers, just or unjust, from the willing 
or unwilling constot of the people. And so war exists by 
the consent of the people. Grudgingly and unwillingly 
men give their consent, after being appealed to by false 



570 OUR DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY 

patriotism, by the glamor of a sham glory, by coercion and 
fraud — but none the less the consent of the people. No 
war can be waged successfully without the support of pub- 
lic opinion. It demands a righteous cause, a just issue, 
and the use of all other means first. Let the people really 
know why they go to war; let them see the petty grounds 
of the quarrel ; let them appreciate the justice of the com- 
promise that is offered as a way out, and wars of revenge, 
of greed, of jealousy become impossible. 

Let in the light and publicity will cure most of the 
world's international ills. 

While it may not be germane to the subject I cannot for- 
bear expressing the hope and the belief that the appalling 
suffering inflicted upon the peoples of Europe will greatly 
hastf^n tlie day of a world-wide democracy — when the peo- 
ple sli 11 indeed rule and kings and emperors and czars shall 
be no more. And as democracy increases, the lust for war, 
no lon"-er fanned by the scheming ambitions of individuals, 
will decline. 

Refc'^rin'^ afrain to the program of the League of Na- 
tions, should the weight of world opinion prove ineffective, 
the League has in its proposed economic boycott, a weapon 
almost as powerful as war itself. Few nations could with- 
stand its pressure for long. Money, the stock-exchanges, 
the cables, the wireless, the postal service, all are interna- 
tional forces without which no nation could long make war, 
even if it eonld provide its own munitions and provender. 
And shonlrl this fail it is not inconsistent with the highest 
ideals of Pr^ace to create a police force to maintain or to 
compel peace. 

The woHd is sick of war. and more willing than ever 
before to lis:ten to the voice of sanity, and to put an end to 
international anarchy, wherein each nation "ttempts to 
enforee its ind^-ments l)v its own arms. Official repre- 
sentatives of Encland and of France have announced that 
their peonies are willing to co-operate in some such pro- 
gram. The preference of the Czar of Russia for peace 



AMERICA SHOULD LEAD 571 

cannot be questioned. Chancellor von Betlimann Hollweg 
sweeps aside the German advocates of ruthlessness, and 
declares that Germany is ready to join in the movement 
to prevent a recurrence of such a war. The United States 
is the logical nation to begin this movement for which 
destiny has now prepared mankind. Never before since 
the dawn of history has such an opportunity been pre- 
sented to any nation as now comes to ours. And, gentle- 
men, our appeal will be irresistible. 

The only danger is that we may lose our unique oppor- 
tunity thru the scattering of our energies, thru becoming 
confused and ensnared in the multitude of considerations 
and possibilities which the war brings to the minds of 
thinking men and women. Our task is to keep one single 
issue burning into the general human consciousness : That 
the world can and must find some other way to settle dif- 
ferences of opinion than by the slaughter of men and the 
starving of M^omen and children. 

General Grant said near the close of his career that he 
never saw a cause of dispute between nations which could 
not have been settled by a resort to peaceful means. Emer- 
son said : " It is not a great matter how long men refuse 
to believe the advent of Peace ; a universal Peace is as sure 
as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism, of liberal 
governments over feudal forms. The question for us is 
only 'How soon?' " 

Gentlemen, the time has come. God grant that the Amer- 
ican people will accept the responsibility and the oppor- 
tunity. 



MISCELLANEOUS ADDRESSES 



DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURING IN KANSAS. 

From an Address Delivered to the Pittsburg Chamber of 
Commerce, March 31, 1916. 

I am glad to come to this thriving, bustling city of Pitts- 
burg and to have the opportunity of talking for a few min- 
utes to business men who are doing things worth while. I 
congratulate you upon your organization and upon the 
thought behind it. I believe in the Commercial Club idea, 
not only because you can accomplish more for your city 
by working together, but also because of the subjective 
effect of such an organization — the effect upon the indi- 
vidual member. When two or three business men, com- 
petitors in business, are able to lay aside their petty dif- 
ferences, their jealousies, their rivalry, and take off their 
coats and work together toward one common end, they be- 
come better citizens and better men, whether they accom- 
plish what they started out to accomplish or not. It is a 
fine thing, this idea of co-operation for the common good; 
it is the only way in which real Twentieth Century prog- 
ress is made. 

But I have not come here to utter platitudes about co- 
operative effort, nor to indulge in fulsome praise of what 
this Commercial Club is doing. Instead, I want to talk to 
you for a few minutes upon what I believe to be one of the 
biggest business problems confronting us as citizens of 
Kansas. That problem is the industrial development of 
this great state of ours. 

Kansas is not going backward. It becomes a better state 

573 



574 MANUFACTURING IN KANSAS 

every year, a better state in which to live. Our per capita 
wealth, our bank deposits, and the happiness and content- 
ment of our people as a whole, all testify to our general 
and genuine prosperity. 

Nature has been good to us. Kansas has nothing to com- 
plain of. But this wealth — the envy of many of our less 
fortunate sister states — has been for the most part, taken 
from the soil, and much of it has been taken in a way that 
decreases the soil's fertility and so impairs the state's cap- 
ital stock. 

And much of this wealth which we produce annually is 
sent out of the state in exchange for commodities which we 
can produce and ought to produce at home. "We have been 
backward in developing along the industrial line, and as a 
consequence we are not making the gains in population that 
we ought to make, and we fall far short in taking advan- 
tage of all our opportunities for material advancement. 

Our slow growth in population is due, I believe, pri- 
marily to three things : 

In the first place, we develop so many bright young men 
and Avomen within our borders that the rest of the world 
makes a draft upon us for men and women to fill positions 
requiring brains, energy, ability, courage and faith. As a 
consequence, too many of our young people go to other 
states where there are larger cities in the hope of finding 
wider opportunities of endeavor and greater reward for 
their effort. We must stop that. 

In the second place, the business of farming, the chief 
occupation of our people, constantly requires a larger work- 
ing capital and more elaborate and expensive equipment. 
As a result, our farms are becoming larger, with less man 
power to the acre. The farm tractor and other modern 
farm machinery tend to increase acreage and to decrease 
the number of farm laborers. This retards the increase of 
rural population. 

In the third place, the attitude of our people as a whole 
toward manufacturing is a serious handicap to our gro\\4h. 



BUILD UP HOME INDUSTRIES 575 

Indeed, I regard it as the most serious of the three. "We 
are so accustomed, all of us, bankers, business men and 
citizens in general, to look to the Kansas soil and the hard- 
working Kansas farmer to support us that we have become 
negligent of other opportunities and are slow to develop 
or encourage industrial enterprise. We must change the 
attitude of the Kansas mind toward industry and realize 
that a state cannot prosper on corn, and wheat, and hogs, 
and cattle alone. We must stop selling our raw material 
at a low price, shipping it to the East and then shipping 
it back and buying it as finished products at a high price, 
paying the freight both ways and a handsome profit to 
enterprising men beyond our borders. We do not intend 
to take one step backward as an agricultural state, but 
we must also become a manufacturing state — "a pay-roll 
state," if you please — with factories working twelve months 
in the year and a big home market for our products. We 
do not want to build a Chinese wall around Kansas; we 
have too much to sell the rest of the world to do that; but 
we must learn to produce within the state more of the 
things we now purchase from our neighbors. Some one 
has said that the average Kansan gets up in the morning 
in a house made in Michigan, at the sound of an alarm 
clock made in Illinois, buttons his Massachusetts suspenders 
to Missouri overalls ; washes his hands with Cincinnati soap 
in a Pennsylvania basin; sits down to a Grand Rapids 
table ; eats Battle Creek breakfast food and Chicago bacon, 
cooked on a Michigan range ; puts New York harness on a 
span of Missouri mules and hitches them to a South Bend 
wagon or starts up his Illinois tractor with a Moline plow 
attached. After the day's work, he rides to town in a 
Detroit automobile ; buys a Key West cigar for himself and 
a box of St. Louis candy for his wife ; and spins back home, 
where he listens to music canned in Camden, New Jersey; 
reads a ch'ipter from a Bible printed in Boston; says a 
prayer written in Jerusalem; crawls between sheets made 
in New England and dreams made in Heaven, supremely 



576 MANUFACTURING IN KANSAS 

happy in the consciousness he has money from all over the 
world in the bank, with which to satisfy the needs of his 
large and growing family. 

And that's all well enough when he has the money, but 
he is keeping his eggs all in one basket ; he is depending for 
his money on agriculture alone ; he is the victim of crop 
failure and low prices; he lacks the independence which 
comes from having more than one string to his bow. And 
this, gentlemen, is a condition which we must change. 
There is no reason in the world why a large portion of the 
stock of goods in the retail establishments of Pittsburg 
should not be manufactured right here in Kansas. While 
in Boston last summer attending the conference of gov- 
ernors, I was seated at dinner one night next to a promi- 
nent New England shoe manufacturer. I asked him where 
was his best market and he replied "In the Southwest," 
and told me how many carloads of shoes he shipped to 
Kansas City every year to be sold in this state and ad- 
jacent territory. I asked him where the leather came from 
that he used in making those shoes and he told me, "From 
the Southwest," the hides from the big packing companies 
in this part of the country. I asked him if there was any 
reason why those shoes could not be manuf ictured in Kan- 
sas and he replied : "No reason at all excepting that you 
haven 't got started at it. All that is needed is to get some- 
body behind the project who can interest capital and do 
the work. To be sure, Kansas is not full of skilled shoe- 
makers, but they can easily be obtained and your native 
workmen can easily learn the trade." There is no reason 
in the world why we shouldn't be making in Kansas not 
only a large part of the 10 million dollars' worth of boots 
and shoes we buy every year, but also a part of the billion 
dollars' worth that the nation produces. 

Neither is there any reason why we shouldn't manufac- 
ture in Kansas all of the nearly 2 million dollars' worth 
of harness and saddlery which the people of the state pur- 
chase every year. We could not only make that, but we 



KANSANS SPEND MILLIONS 577 

could help supply the rest of the nation with the 60 mil- 
lion dollars' wortli that it uses. 

The output of the wagon and carriage factories of the 
United States is 40 millions of dollars ; Kansas purchases 
$1,400,000 worth — despite the automobile — and manufac- 
tures practically none. 

We buy IIV2 million dollars' worth of furniture and 
refrigerators; the nation buys a half billion dollars' worth 
— little of which we produce. 

We manufacture a little soap, but nothing like the 2^/4 
million dollars' worth we buy. The nation uses 114 mil- 
lion dollars' worth — and we might be producing a big 
share of it. There is a 40-million dollar market for thresh- 
ing machinery in the United States and nearly 3 million 
dollar market in Kansas ; there 's a quarter billion market 
in the nation for knit goods and hosiery ; Kansas alone 
buys $3,700,000 worth and produces none. And so on thru 
the entire list of the ordinary commodities of life. Incu- 
bators, brooms, cereals and breakfast foods — hundreds of 
them which Kansas might produce from raw materials just 
at hand. 

Here is a little comparison of the way Kansas ranks wdth 
Iowa in its manufacture : 

Excluding flour mills and packing houses, Kansas has 
2,900 establishments manufacturing products to the value 
of 90 millions of dollars ; while Iowa has 5,200 establish- 
ments manufacturing products to the value of 187 million 
dollars every year. 

Iowa has 512 butter, cheese and condensed milk factories, 
while Kansas has but 60 ; 

Iowa has 235 brick and tile factories, while Kansas has 
55; 

Iowa has 229 wood working establishments and Kansas 
26; 

Iowa has 119 carriage and w^agon factories and Kansas 
26; 



578 MANUFACTURING IN KANSAS 

Iowa has 42 establishments for making agricultural im- 
plements, while Kansas has only 18 ; 

Iowa has 71 canning and preserving factories, while Kan- 
sas has a lone little 3 ; and so on down the line ; 

Kansas has one factory making dairyman, poultryman 
and bee supplies, Iowa has 17 ; 

Kansas has one boot and shoe factory, Iowa 10 ; 

Kansas one women's clothing factory, Iowa 19; 

Kansas one stove and furniture factory, Iowa 13 ; 

Kansas one coffin factory, Iowa 10 ; 

Kansas one glove factory, Iowa 10; 

Kansas one cutlery and tool factory, Iowa 16 ; 

Kansas one woolen mill, Iowa 8 ; 

And Iowa, as Kansas, is primarily an agricultural state, 
but at the same time she manufactures hundreds of articles 
which her own people use, and sells many of them to Kan- 
sas and other states. I cite Iowa because she is a typical 
Western state with no greater natural advantages, for 
manufacturing than we have — not as many as you have 
here in Pittsburg. 

Take Indiana as another typical agricultural state. With 
an area of 36,000 square miles, as compared witli our area 
of 83,000, Indiana has a population of 2,700,000 while we 
have only 1% million. She has 75 inhabitants to the square 
mile while we have 22. But she has 51 cities of more than 
5,000 population, to our 24; and 7,969 factories to our 
3,435. Her industries give employment to 218,263 persons, 
while we have only 54,649 engaged in the industries. The 
value of the products of her industries is $579,075,000, 
while Kansas manufactures products amounting to 325 
million dollars. Indiana annually adds to her permanent 
wealth by manufacturing $244,700,000 and Kansas only 
$66,220,000. 

Other states are keenly alive to the importance of indus- 
trial development. I never take a trip East that I am not 
impressed by the number of factories I see from the car 
window, in every city and town and even small village 



OPPORTUNITIES IN KANSAS 579 

thru which we pass, all giving employment to labor and 
distributing thru their pay-roll thousands of dollars to be 
spent in their respective communities. Is there any rea- 
son why every Kansas town cannot do what these Eastern 
towns are doing? Is there any reason why Kansas with 
its mild climate and thousands of acres of alfalfa should 
import cheese from Wisconsin, or with its adaptability to 
fruit and vegetables should import canned goods from 
Michigan and New York and Ohio? Why should we im- 
port thousands of car loads of Michigan salt when we have 
an inexhaustible supply in Central Kansas? As a matter 
of fact, it would be easily possible for 'the larger portion 
of the goods on the shelves of your retailers here in Pitts- 
burg to be Kansas goods, produced by Kansas labor from 
Kansas raw materials. All we need is a fuller apprecia- 
tion of our possibilities, a stronger faith in our ability and 
a freer action of that enterprising spirit which we like to 
think is characteristic of Kansas and Kansas people. 

This is not a matter that concerns our towns and cities 
alone. Every citizen of Kansas has an interest in it. In- 
crease the pay-rolls of Pittsburg and you increase your 
home market for farm products and increase the value of 
every farm in this county. As Kansas towns and cities 
grow, our agriculture becomes more diversified and more 
profitable. The farmer adjacent to a city naturally turns 
from the one-crop system ; he adopts the plan of intensive 
cultivation, calling for the employment of more labor. This 
means smaller farms and more country people — more coun- 
try trade for the city merchant — so that the ''home mar- 
ket" of both the farmer and the merchant is benefited. 

And we must not forget our soil is not inexhaustible. 
We cannot continue indefinitely to draw upon its fertility, 
without deterioration. Every bushel of wheat shipped out 
of the state ; every bushel of corn, every ton of hay, re- 
moves just so much fertility and reduces by just so much 
the capital stock of our people. We look upon Kansas as 
a great flour state, but less than 50 per cent of the wheat 



580 MANUFACTURING IN KANSAS 

we grow is milled in Kansas; more than half is shipped 
out of the state carrying with it the bran and shorts which 
ought to be fed to livestock and so returned to our soil, in 
order to avoid soil exhaustion. It is a reproach to the en- 
terprise of Kansas capital and Kansas business men that 
practically our whole wheat crop is not milled in this state ; 
that more of our corn is not fed to stock or converted into 
finished food products. Pittsburg can manufacture as 
good breakfast food as Battle Creek and as good starch as 
Oswego, New York. We grow thousands of acres of broom- 
corn, but the big profit on the brooms we use goes to other 
states. It has been demonstrated that the best quality of 
strawboard can be manufactured profitably from Kansas 
wheat straw. We have a half dozen successful glass plants 
in southeast Kansas. I am told there is a fine opportunity 
for ten times as many as we now have. On every side of 
us we are producing the raw materials which enter into 
the high priced products of modern life, but only a very 
small percentage of them are finished in Kansas. 

Pittsburg with its cheap fuel is especially interested in 
the development of Kansas industries. With the natural 
advantages you have here, this city should become one of 
the most important manufacturing centers in the entire 
West. In many lines, you can compete with any city in 
the nation and you have at your door a big and constantly 
growing market, for I want to say to you that the farm 
homes of Kansas and Oklahoma and this whole region are 
every day becoming greater consumers of those things 
which a generation ago were considered luxuries. The 
farmer of Kansas has not yet become a bloated plutocrat. 
He isn't rushing away to the cities to spend his hard-earned 
dollars for a few minutes' pleasure on the Great White 
Ways; but he is faring a little better than he did twenty 
years ago; he is living better; he is a better customer, and 
it is up to Kansas capital and Kansas labor to supply him 
so far as possible with Kansas products. 

I believe the commercial organizations of the state are 



BUY KANSAS MADE GOODS 581 

thoroly alive to the situation and I am glad to see it. We 
do not want to encourage the boom spirit; we want no J. 
Eufus Wallingfords to bob up over night with promises 
of an everlasting fortune in the next few days. We are 
not particularly eager for any elaborate factory promotion 
schemes with hot air as the foundation and blue sky as the 
roof. That is not what Kansas needs. Instead we want 
an intelligent study of the situation by just such men as 
make up this organization ; we want a careful scrutiny of 
the possibilities in every individual instance. We want a 
spirit of co-operation on the part of our bankers and cap- 
italists, and then we want the earnest and hearty support 
of merchants and the general public. It isn't enough for 
our newspapers to print articles about supporting home 
institutions. It isn't enough merely to appeal to the pa- 
triotism of the consumers. We must get in earnest about 
it ; we must get our merchants to realize the necessity of 
pushing Kansas-made goods whenever possible ; the whole- 
saler and retailer must be brought to see that it pays in 
the long run to encourage Kansas industries — that every 
time he sells a Kansas-made product he is increasing his 
home market just that much. Most of all we must stand 
by and encourage the industries we already have, in order 
that they may demonstrate by their success the possibilities 
in this state and so lead more capital to investment in Kan- 
sas manufactories. Let our slogan be: "Kansas goods 
for Kansas people." 

I realize, gentlemen, that this is a slow process ; naturally 
time will be required ; but the very fact that it does take 
time emphasizes the need of every effort to accelerate the 
work of educating the capitalist, merchandiser and consum- 
er to an appreciation of the possibilities. Talk, to be sure, 
will not establish factories, but a sane study of the possibili- 
ties of the markets you can roach from Pittsburg ; a survey 
of the raw materials to which you have ready access, and a 
bolstering up of your own faith in yourselves, will do won- 
ders in the way of coaxing timid capital from its hiding 



582 MANUFACTURINO IN KANSAS 

places, and prevent it being squandered upon get-rich-quick 
schemes a thousand miles away. I urge you to make this 
one of the chief features of your year's program of work. 
Talk Kansas-made goods and the industrial development 
of Kansas. We do not know, we cannot foresee, what will 
happen to America in a business way when the great 
tragedy that now envelops Europe is ended. We do not 
know what place America will take in the commerce of 
the world. If we hold our own in Europe, in South Amer- 
ica, in the Orient, there will be an abundant outlet for the 
products of this section of the country. If we slip back, 
should the war-stricken nations turn with fresh vigor to 
the arts of peace and flood the markets of the world with 
their goods, there is all the more reason for Kansas to study 
its home market and to develop it to the limit ; all the more 
reason why Kansas should utilize within its own borders 
as much of its raw materials as possible, and produce at 
home from Kansas materials, with Kansas fuel and Kansas 
labor and Kansas capital and Kansas enterprise, the greater 
part of what Kansas consumes. 



CONSCIENTIOUS PUBLIC SERVICE. 

From an Address at Overhrook Farmers' Institute, Feh- 
ruary 26, 1916. 

I hope to see presented to the next legislature a plan of 
reorganization that will mean not only a saving of thou- 
sands of dollars to the tax bearers of the state, but what 
is of greater importance, will increase the efficiency of 
every servant of the people, and bring us cleaner, better, 
more adequate and more responsible government. 

We are going to have a better system of government in 
this state and it is going to cost us less money; not less 
money in dollars and cents, perhaps, but less money in 



ASPIRATIONS OF KANSANS 583 

the sense that we will get a larger measure of value for 
every dollar of public expenditure. Selfish interests, bit- 
ter partisanships, political tricksters may impede our prog- 
ress temporarily, but the plain, common sense of the peo- 
ple will see to it that the thing is done in the end. 

I believe we have all, somewhere within us, the deeply 
patriotic purpose — each in his own way as light and op- 
portunity is given him — to advance, as a citizen and as a 
Kansan, the good name and fame of Kansas by further 
perfecting its government and institutions, so that the peo- 
ple may make that material and spiritual progress toward 
high efficiency, thrift and right living that makes a state 
and its people truly great and truly happy. To such a 
people is given leadership among peoples, a greater part, 
a greater honor, and a greater destiny and influence in 
the world. 

Kansas has shown such leadership as this in many things. 
It is one of the great states in the American commonwealth. 
But other states are now doing things in which we should 
not be backward. Therefore, as a citizen and as your serv- 
ant, I ask for your faithful and loyal support in the effort 
I hope we shall be able to make to put Kansas well to the 
front in the new and ail-American movement toward better 
government and more efficient, conscientious public serv- 
ice, the key to all future progress. 

Everything indicates this to be the deepest aspiration of 
the Kansas people at this time, and I hope they will not 
be satisfied till they get it by the grace of God and their 
best efforts. 

I ask for your assistance as citizens, as farmers and as 
business men, to help Kansas and the Kansas people to a 
finer statesmanship and a greater statehood. It is not a 
one-man's job, nor a hundred men's task, but a responsi- 
bility that rests on all of us, and I don't believe Kansas is 
going to shirk it. 

It is by noting such incidents as the scandal at Terre 
Haute, the noisome Lorimer case in Illinois, the criminal 



584 CONSCIENTIOUS PUBLIC SERVICE 

•politico-labor Avar in Colorado, the political corruption of 
Pennsylvania, New York and many other states, that such 
Western commonwealths as Kansas may get a perspective 
on the great advance they are making in intelligent, vigil- 
ant citizenship, in self-government, in higher, happier, 
more humane conditions and standards of civilization and 
living. 

I believe that Kansas and the West are the pillar of fire 
that is to lead the American nation to its promised land. 
It is well that we as Westerners should realize how well 
we are fulfilling a manifest destiny, that we may take fresh 
courage and resolve never to prove unworthy of the leader- 
ship and responsibility that has come to us unsought. 



A PLEA FOR THE SIMPLE LIFE. 

From an Address at First Christian Church, Lawrence, 
Novemher 26, 1916. 

We are living in an age of reckless extravagance in both 
private and public affairs. The simple, wholesome life of 
American tradition has been supplanted by the popular 
craze for display and frippery. Speed mania, dissipation, 
too many distractions, over stinuilation of the emotions, are 
giving the boys and girls of today fatally wrong ideas of 
life. It is almost a national peril. We are all more or less 
the victims of a wave of bad taste, a lowering of standards 
of conduct, a universal rag-time of the tiddle-de-winks of 
life. We need to get back to tliat wholesome simplicity, 
that old-fashioned home-life from which we started. I 
would like to see a return to the old dictum of our child- 
hood, that modesty and neatness in dress is becoming and 
seemly and that extreme styles and extravagant dressing 
are not only vain but ridiculous and foolish. I do not mean 
that we should live meagerly or parsimoniously, but that 



SIMPLE LIFE IS BEST 585 

we should go back to the solid, substantial things of life, 
to standards of living which benefit the individual instead 
of injuring him, which tend toward human progress, to- 
ward uplifting humanity and not toward a lowering of the 
stamina of the people. 

The great business of every state and nation is home- 
making and the training of the young. No success can 
make up for a failure here. No community can evade this 
duty except at the cost of its own decline and destruction. 
It is little less than criminal to bring up boys or girls in 
idleness and without teaching them the good old-fashioned 
virtue, thrift. Too many boys and girls are being brought 
up to receive continually and give practically nothing in 
return. 

We should give every possible encouragement to the boys 
and girls to earn something during vacation in the back 
yards, or about the house, by repairs, dressmaking, cook- 
ing or millinery. School savings banks should be encour- 
aged to stimulate the rising generation to acquire habits of 
industry and thrift. 

I fear the present system of over-educating brings boys 
and girls out of some schools who think they know so much 
that they need not work with their hands. Unless such 
boys can get an easy job in an office they simply won't 
work, and the girls refuse to do housework. This kind of 
schooling is a fatal error, not only for the individual, but 
for society. The world's work must be done and our boys 
must be taught that all labor is honorable. Inculcating 
the doctrine of thrift would have a wonderful bearing 
upon lessening criminal costs, suicides, divorces, dissipa- 
tion and calls for charity. 



PUT THE PUBLIC BUSINESS ON A BUSINESS BASIS 

From an Address to the Kansas Bankers' Association at 
Wichita, Kan., April 21, 1915. 

I am going to do a little plain talking tonight, because 
I believe the plain truth is good for us. The average busi- 
ness man, thru mistaken motives, or thru no mo- 
tives, has come to be almost a cipher in the political af- 
fairs of his community. For years he has been shame- 
fully, habitually and unpatriotically neglecting his polit- 
ical duties. As a business man to business men, I am here 
to say to you bankers of Kansas that what we need most 
in this country, what we must have, and what we are soon 
going to get, is more business in our politics and in our 
public affairs. This now is our greatest lack in govern- 
ment, the reason why we have the poorest, the loosest, the 
most inefficient and the most expensive public service, 
from top to bottom, of any first-class nation on earth. 

Up to the present time our unquestioned industry and 
our great natural resources have pulled us thru. Per- 
haps this has partly been the trouble, we have been too 
busy. But we can no longer let our public affairs manage 
themselves under the spoils system, which everywhere is 
hampering our statesmanship and preventing a business- 
like conduct of our public service. Largely as a result 
of this, everywhere we find our public expenditures are 
doubling, if not more than doubling every 10 years. 

Our present system of public service was born in the 
days of the stage coach and the blunderbuss. It is utterly 
incapable of keeping step with the quick march of modern 
progress. Every year it is falling farther and farther be- 
hind. It is so inefficient and unmanageable in its methods, 

586 



TOO MUCH POWER FOR BOSSES 587 

that thru its own inadvertence it frequently defeats its 
own good purposes and invariably brings keen disappoint- 
ment to the people. It has thwarted the will, discouraged 
the genius and hindered the progress of the American peo- 
ple for generations and never more so than today. 

In city, county, state and nation, the expense of the pub- 
lic service costs the man of means and property, most. It 
is going to cost him still more, if, thru his personal 
neglect, he makes it known he is content that tit shall. But 
that is not all it will cost him. It is going to cost him 
vastly more, in the hampered progress, in the stunted de- 
velopment of his community, of his state, of his business. 
There is nothing surer. The old world has found this out 
and has acted on it sooner than we have. 

In the past we have been inclined to let the bosses and 
the professional politicians do about as they pleased with 
us in this country. We are not going to continue this 
policy. But I think few of us appreciate the magnitude 
of the task of reform and reorganization there is before 
us, or that as yet we are not getting the help and assist- 
ance of the men best qualified to direct us. They are the 
business men. 

Why can't we apply a little American business sense 
to government? 

In every community the men of finest executive ability 
and of greatest influence on its life and progress are the 
bankers and business men. I don't believe they have, or 
that the people have, any conception of what we are losing, 
thru not having the active personal interest and assist- 
ance of these men in making the public business a business. 

Especially in the larger cities, we ought to have the bene- 
fit of the brain and the influence of the smartest men in 
the community — the business men — in directing the busi- 
ness affairs of the community. It is a reflection on our 
common sense, and on their patriotism, that we, and they, 
have let the politicians brush them to one side, that party 
spoilsmen might play ducks and drakes with public prog- 



588 BUSINESS BASIS ESSENTIAL 

ress and public funds. This is our great and pressing need 
at this time in every community, in every state and in the 
nation, and we cannot afford to continue to neglect it. 

I have no panacea to offer you for our political ills. I 
have no pet schemes to put thru and no revolutionary 
measures to propose. All that I hope to accomplish is to 
bring to the administration of your public system in Kan- 
sas, modern business methods, to do the best that we can 
do in existing conditions. 

I believe we all will admit that the machinery of govern- 
ment — state government, county government, and muni- 
cipal government, as it exists in Kansas today, is not en- 
tirely ideal. It is expensive and cumbersome, as is amply 
attested by tlie fact that in the last ten years the total ex- 
pense of the government for the state of Kansas has in- 
creased from 15 million dollars a year to more than 28 mil- 
lion dollars, while population has been slightly increased, 
and this without any conspicuous graft or corrupt deals, 
without anj^ public official pilfering from the treasury. 
We have, of course, received some benefits from the in- 
creased taxes. We have built up many institutions which 
are a credit to the state, but no man will dare say that the 
people of Kansas in the last ten years have received 100 
per cent benefit from the money they have paid in taxes. 

In my opinion, many changes must be made in our sys- 
tem of government. As a state, we must follow the ex- 
ample set by the great railway systems and business cor- 
porations in adopting modern scientific business methods, 
in the elimination of useless positions and in requiring the 
very highest efficiency on the part of every public servant. 
And this is not the work of a day, or even of one adminis- 
tration. It requires study of the most scientific nature, 
and statesmanship of the highest kind ; all prompted and 
backed by a determination to. give the people of the state 
the best system of government that can be devised for 
them. Other states of the Union are taking up this big 
problem and studying it, are investigating and experiment- 



BUYING PUBLIC SUPPLIES 589 

ing and Kansas must step into line and revise her business 
methods, taking advantage of everything which will pro- 
mote efficiency and economy. And, this work must extend 
thruout our entire system, from the governor in the 
state house down to the township trustee. 

I find that in buying public supplies, it is not infre- 
quently the custom for public officials, both state and local, 
to favor a bidder who may be a friend; he may have con- 
tributed liberally to the campaign fund, or he may be con- 
sidered simply a good fellow, whose turn it is to have a 
little of the fatness out of the public crib. I am satisfied 
this pernicious custom is quite common all over the land; 
that many dealers and supply houses feel that they have 
a license to graft in this way on the public treasury. 

I recently was somewhat surprised to find a certain firm 
selling supplies to the state at about 10 per cent more than 
it was charging me for the same goods in my own business. 

"Why?" I asked. 

The answer I got was that it always had been the "cus- 
tom" to get a little better price from the state. 

I may say that it is a custom which shall abruptly cease 
under this administration. The state is entitled to the 
lowest price given to anyone, and I shall make it my busi- 
ness to see, during this administration, that the man who 
makes the lowest price shall invariably and regularly get 
the business, without regard to his religion, his nationality, 
his good fellowship or his political pull. 

And, so, my friends, I have an abiding faith in an 
early adjustment of our sadly out-of-line governmental 
machinery ; I have faith that our business sense will lead 
us to the early adoption of modern business methods in 
.our public affairs; and I have faith that you bankers of 
Kansas and the business men of Kansas, as good citizens, 
as patriots, as men of honor, will unite in an effort to 
make your state government the most efficient, the most 



590 BUSINESS BASIS ESSENTIAL 

economical, the most just, the most humane, the most use- 
ful and helpful in all this republic. 

My short experience as a public official has convinced 
me more firmly than ever, that the great need in our pub- 
lic life is more earnest men, more patriotic men, broader 
men, more level-headed business men who are not con- 
stantly playing the game of politics, men big enough to 
sink their individualities, their partisan bias and their dif- 
ferences of opinion in team work, and for the sake of team 
work, in any and every right direction. We greatly need 
that high appreciation of a public trust which shall inspire 
every party man elected to serve the people, to approach 
his duties with a passion, to do his work, not as a party 
man, but as a true, devoted, steadfast representative of 
that public to which he has, in his official oath, sworn to 
give allegiance and the best there is in him. 

It shall be my effort to encourage such a policy in our 
public business, and I ask for your earnest co-operation. 
I ask for your assistance as business men and as Kansans 
to help Kansas and the Kansas people to a finer statesman- 
ship and a greater statehood. Your governor cannot do 
it all alone ; he must have the whole people of the state 
behind him. 



KANSAS READY FOR GOOD ROADS. 

An Address hy Governor Capper at a State Conference on 
Road Building, 1917. 

The biggest, most vital thing now before Kansas is roads, 
all-year- 'round permanent roads. The one thing at this 
time which will do most for the general welfare of Kansas 
and its people is the building of such roads on a systematic, 
rational, comprehensive plan. This is the next step, the 
most logical step in our development. It is warranted as 



AGENCIES FOR DEVELOPMENT 591 

well as demanded by our great increase of motor traffic, 
and by our great need of motor roads and of motor trans- 
portation in getting our products to market at all times 
of year. 

Thruout the United States, this is a coming nation-wide 
development for which forces long have been gathering, 
and which conditions have been making more and more 
urgent. It has taken our war needs to make us realize 
sharply that we have outgrown our railway facilities, that 
these facilities have a limit. Railway building must de- 
pend on heavy traffic, dense population and long hauls. 
Railways cannot profitably radiate thru countless country 
n(;ighborhoods and little market centers. They have about 
reached the limit of their development in most states. They 
can go little or no farther except thru the double-tracking 
of existing lines and thru team-work, co-ordination, and 
efficiency of operation. The existing lines must now be 
supplemented by trolley lines and by motor-truck trans- 
portation. And permanent road building and motor traffic 
comes first because all the people may use the roads and 
the benefits are more widespread and general. 

The agencies for this new development are all here about 
us except the roads. And now that this great American 
nation is going to see such an era of road building as no 
country ever experienced before, Kansas must not lag be- 
hind, for the time is ripe and the same conditions are here 
and even more markedly here than in many other common- 
wealths. 

In Kansas, to a great extent, our further progress as a 
people now waits upon this development. Kansas now has 
nearly 200,000 motor cars and trucks, representing an in- 
vestment of nearly 200 million dollars. The yearly in- 
crease of motor vehicles in Kansas runs into the thousands, 
and the daily operation of these trucks and cars has a most 
important bearing on the prosperous development of our 
farming industry. These cars are ending the isolation of 



592 GOOD ROADS FOR KANSAS 

country life while enhancing its wholesome benefits and 
improving its commercial and educational opportunities. 

A system of state roads, connecting- all our market cen- 
ters will add new life blood to all our activities. It will 
intensify production, bring better prices, increase popula- 
tion, make better social conditions. It will ameliorate or 
remove more adverse conditions than any other agency. 

Kansas is no laggard. Our general trend always has 
been upward. We have led the nation in many innova- 
tions now accepted M'ithout qualifications. We have an 
immense territory that needs linking together. It was 
quite natural that our first consideration should have been 
the construction of towns which included court houses, 
public schools, educational and eleemosynary institutions 
and libraries. Public utilities, such as electric light plants, 
telephones, water and sewer systems are prevalent tliruout 
the commonwealth. We are now confronted with the prob- 
lem of co-ordinating these centers. 

An elaboration of a system of highways which will make 
communication possible at all times of the year and in all 
kinds of weather, between these trading points, means that 
those living between and around them will have an im- 
proved economic and social life which will redound to the 
best interests of the state as a whole. 

I am proud that during my administration as governor, 
the people established a State Highway Commission to 
work out these construction problems from a state-wide . 
viewpoint and to take advantage of Federal aid which the 
government has so generously offered. Every state in the 
Union now has a Highway Commission and I am glad to 
say that the administration of the Kansas commission has 
been most effective. While the amount of funds at the 
commission's disposal has been most modest and it has had 
no money with which to aid directly in road and bridge 
con.struction, the commission has Avorked out a system of 
highways, connecting the counties, which reaches 85 per 



STATE HIGHWAY COMMISSION 593 

cent of our population and 92 per cent of the taxable prop- 
erty. 

The nation is now getting ready for a reconstruction 
program which not only will make up for lost time during 
the war, but will utilize the immense force of men who are 
returning from overseas and who are coming home thoroly 
converted to advantages of stable construction in highway 
work. 

The state of Illinois at the recent election, by a vote of 
6 to 1, voted to issue 60 million dollars in bonds for build- 
ing hard-surfaced roads, all of which will be paid for out 
of the automobile fund. If the state of Illinois can build 
a system of 4,800 miles of hard-surfaced roads out of her 
automobile fund and pay the interest and principal out of 
this fund in twenty years, Kansas can do likewise, as Kan- 
sas has more automobiles per capita than Illinois and we 
have just as good cement plants as our sister state. The 
funds for such work will be spent for work and wages and 
materials within our own borders and a greater part of 
the money will come back to us. 

I feel sure that the people of Kansas believe the time 
has come to begin a road-building program. Our High- 
way Commission stands ready to push any plans the gov- 
ernment may wish in connection with its reconstruction 
program and I believe we shall be derelict in our duty if 
we are not fully alert to our opportunities. 



WHAT MAKES A CITY GREAT? 

From an Address to the Mercantile Clul), Kansas City, 
Kan, Decemher 8, 1915. 

I do not know of any place in the United States in which 
I would rather speak on the subject, "What Makes a City 
Great?" than in Kansas City, Wyandotte county, Kansas. 



594 WHAT MAKES A CITY GREAT 

And the reason is this : You people of Kansas City already 
have accomplished wonderful things; you have laid the 
foundations of greatness, and you have still more wonder- 
ful possibilities ahead of you. It needs no prophet to see 
that this city at the mouth of the Kaw is destined to growth 
and progress and power — growth and progress in and of 
itself without reference to the fate of your sister city on 
the other side of the river. Your destiny is not necessarily 
bound up with that of Kansas City, Missouri. You may 
have been at one time a suburb, a side-show, a spill-over 
from across the river, but that day is past; as the metrop- 
olis of the great state of Kansas you have achieved an 
individuality of your own, despite the unfortunate identity 
of names, and your future depends upon the development 
of that individuality. 

Kansas City, Kansas, has, I believe, the two factors that 
contribute most to the development of a great city : You 
have the opportunity which comes with a favorable loca- 
tion ; you have builded your city at the gateway to an em- 
pire whose rich productiveness never has been excelled. 
And more important than that you have proved to the 
world that you have men and women with the large vision, 
the strong faith in the future, and the untiring energy 
that is indispensable to every great undertaking. 

The opportunity is here and you have the spirit to make 
the most of it. 

I have hot come here to indulge in flattery or fulsome 
praise of what you already have accomplished ; but it is 
well for all of us to stop at times to take stock— to review 
what we have done — to see ourselves as we really are, and 
to determine so far as possible, what factors have contrib- 
uted most largely to the progress we have made. 

Kansas City, Kansas, has very many things of which, to 
be proud. Overshadowed as you have been by your larger 
— and shall I say, more vociferous? — sister on the Missouri 
side, the people of Kansas and of the nation do not realize 
what you have and are doing. 



WONDERFUL ACCOMPLISHMENTS 595 

Few Kansans realize, for example, the extent of your 
manufacturing interests. The city across the river has 
the pleasant little habit of gobbling up all the credit for 
about everything you do over here. I saw not long ago a 
very handsome booklet issued by the enterprising Com- 
mercial club of the Missouri city setting forth the magni- 
tude of its industrial and manufacturing interests, and I 
noticed that a large part of their thunder was supplied 
by you people on the Kansas side. There need be no un- 
seemly rivalry between the two cities; any spirit of envy 
or bitterness should be avoided; but Kansas City, Kansas, 
must see to it that she gets full credit for all she does, and 
that the industrial world and especially the people of our 
own state fully understand her resources and her standing. 

As a matter of fact, your manufacturing output of 160 
million dollars or more this year probably is three times 
as great as that of Kansas City, Missouri. You have in- 
dustries here to support a large population, and it is most 
gratifying to see that new ones are coming to you every 
month and every year, attracted by your favorable loca- 
tion and the many advantages you are able to offer them. 

So much for your business and industrial development. 
Great as it is, encouraging as it has been, there are other 
factors which to my mind are of still more vital impor- 
tance to you today and of greater weight in determining 
your future. A city is not made up exclusively of work- 
shops and factories — indeed, these industries are only the 
foundations upon which a great city is built. Men must 
have a means of livelihood, but that supplied — the funda- 
mental need taken care of — the big question is the environ- 
ment in which they live; the atmosphere in which they 
rear their families ; the moral and civic tone of their com- 
munity. It must be the aim of city-builders not only to 
provide means of making money, but more important, to 
make a good place in which to live. 

Kansas City is a good place to live in. The God-fearing 
men and women have not neglected the welfare of your 



596 WHAT MAKES A CITY GREAT 

souls ; you have churches of almost every denomination and 
other religious institutions which are doing good work. 
You are not neglecting the training of your youth ; indeed, 
Kansas City, Kansas, has especial reason to be proud of 
her school system. I am told that your public and paro- 
chial schools have a total enrollment of 17,000 boys and 
girls; that your three high schools are training more than 
2,600 youths and are giving them an education of both 
brain and hand which will fit them for the work of life. 
You have laid the foundation of a university of your own, 
which ought to be encouraged and developed. 

But, most of all, I want to commend your excellent night 
high school, which is doing such excellent work especially 
among your citizens of foreign birth who have had small 
opportunity in English education. It is of the greatest 
importance that a city such as yours with its large per- 
centage of sturdy workers from foreign lands should em- 
ploy every possible means to convert these newcomers into 
loyal, intelligent, patriotic American citizens. America has 
well been called the "Melting Pot of Nations." We are 
proud of being a land of refuge for the oppressed and the 
superfluous of other countries. But, what shall come from 
the crucible, what the future American shall be, depends 
entirely upon the treatment we accord the new-comer and 
the development we enable him to make. It is a serious 
problem which confronts every city of any magnitude and 
I congratulate you upon the start you have made in this 
work. It deserves every encouragement, and while I have 
no doubt it costs money, I am sure from a purely business 
point of view, it is a paying investment. 

In connection with your schools, I want to say a word 
about your Parent-Teachers' association. I learn that it 
has been a big factor in the development of your excellent 
school system. It cannot be otherwise. The closer the 
bonds between the home and school the more efficient the 
training and education. The sympathetic co-operation of 
the parent is absolutely essential to a good school, as is 



MUNICIPAL INDUSTRIES 597 

evidenced by the work you are accomplishing thru the 
enthusiastic Parent-Teachers' association here. 

Another factor which I believe has already contributed 
much to the well-being of your city and which is destined 
to do still more is your commission form of government. 
You are one of the first cities and one of the largest cities 
to adopt this modern, business-like method of handling 
public affairs. I do not imagine that it has worked out 
100 per cent perfect, but it is a long step in the right 
direction, and if every citizen will perform his full civic 
duty and will keep alive his interest in civic affairs not 
only on election day, but 365 days in the year, it is pos- 
sible for you to have a model city government. "We are 
prone to think that the full responsibility of good govern- 
ment rests upon the office-holders alone. We cast our vote 
on election day, if it is convenient for us to do so, and let 
it go at that ; while as a matter of fact the officers of your 
nation, of your state and of your city need your active 
interest and sympathy and co-operation every day in the 
year. 

You are accomplishing much in the experiment of muni- 
cipal industries. Your city-owned electric light and water 
plants have attracted the attention of students of muni- 
cipal affairs from all over the country. 

I am not a municipal efficiency expert and I do not 
feel qualified to point out to you tonight the royal road 
to municipal greatness. But I do know this : 

No matter how great your natural advantages ; no mat- 
ter how. many manufacturing establishments erect plants 
here ; no matter how large the weekly pay-rolls of wage- 
earners, you will not attain your full growth, you will not 
develop to the limit of your possibilities, unless you main- 
tain a spirit of true unity of purpose which will impel you 
to work together for the common good, not only thru 
your ]\Iercantile club, but thru all your organizations of 
every description. 

In years past you have been overshadowed completely 



598 WHAT MAKES A CITY GREAT 

by the larger city across the river. You are too big for 
that, now. You are big enough and strong enough to get 
out from under this Missouri shadow, and give your city 
an individuality. You can do this only by converting 
every citizen into a booster for this city — by cultivating 
the Kansas spirit — by developing a civic pride and a civic 
consciousness which is willing to make sacrifices if need 
be for the common good — by avoiding petty jealousies — 
by really loving your own town and your own state. 

You want to create and foster a spirit of loyalty to your 
own town and your own institutions. You want every 
man, woman and child in Kansas City to appreciate that 
this city has every advantage that any city in the country 
can offer them. You want to develop their faith in Kan- 
sas City and their enthusiasm for Kansas City, and gentle- 
men, you can only do that by showing your own faith and 
your own enthusiasm. It is well for you to reach out after 
new industries ; it is well for you to endeavor to bring more 
people to Kansas City; it is well for you to make Kansas 
City grow, but the greatest work your club can do is to 
promote that spirit of loyalty to your home town which is 
absolutely necessary to any real progress and advancement. 
Make Kansas City people and the people of all Kansas be- 
lieve in Kansas City. The town across the river is a great 
town and will be still greater. Every true Kansan is proud 
of it and rejoices in its growth and prosperity. But so is 
this Kansas City a great town — equally as great in its way 
— and there is no excuse for your allowing Kansas City 
people to look across the river — or to any other city in the 
world — for what they can get here. It is the province of 
your club to keep Kansas people and Kansas money at 
home. You can do no better work than that. 

Pride of that sort makes good citizens. It develops in- 
terest in civil affairs and so makes for more efficient city 
government. It leads to the election of better men, cleaner 
men, to municipal offices. It tends to the removal of petty, 
partisan politics from civic affairs. I think I understand the 



WATCH MACHINE POLITICS 599 

spirit of Kansas City; altho I'll confess that your poli- 
ticians keep me guessing the most of the time. But what- 
ever kind of politicians you have, good or bad, you want 
to keep machine politics out of your city affairs if you 
hope to attain efficiency or economy in their administra- 
tion. The two don't mix. You want that pride which 
says that nothing is too good for Kansas City. This does 
not mean a mad career of extravagance and wastefulness. 
Quite the contrary. Improvements made on an extravagant 
scale; expenditures for what the city does not need; the 
over-burdening of your people and your industries by 
heavy taxation, are not good, but bad. Such things retard 
growth and turn the municipal clock back. But when the 
wide-awake business men of a community are thoroly 
imbued with civic pride, and thoroly determined to 
make of their city a model community, they will see to it 
that both the extremes of extravagance and penuriousness 
are avoided. They will push the city as rapidly as it can 
stand, and no faster. 



MASONRY AND DEMOCRACY. 

From an Address at Masonic Grand Lodge, TopeJca, Feb- 
ruary 16, 1916. 

When I stood for the first time in a lodge of Free and 
Accepted Masons to receive the degree of an entered ap- 
prentice, I learned from the twenty-four inch gauge that 
eight hours of my day should be devoted to the service of 
God and a distressed brother. 

I learned from the form of a lodge that a Free Mason's 
charity should know no bounds. 

When the Worthy Master gave the charge at closing, I 



600 MASONRY AND DEMOCRACY 

heard, "Every human being has a claim upon your kind 
offices. Do good unto all." 

And I was told to practice out of the lodge — and that 
I took to mean wherever I should find myself — those great 
moral duties taught in the lodge. 

"And the greatest of these is charity." 

Nineteen centuries ago when the divine Teacher of man- 
kind made that last journey to Jerusalem, a certain lawyer, 
crafty and full of guile, stood up and tempted Him, asking, 

"And who is my neighbor?" 

The gentle and patient Christ answered His tempter 
with that masterly parable of the Good Samaritan — a 
classic of literature that would live forever even tho our 
faith in its divine Author were lost. The priest and the 
Levite, God's chosen, drew aside their garments, wrapped 
themselves in the cloak of indifference and passed by on 
the other side. The Good Samaritan, forgetting the dif- 
ference of race, of creed and caste, felt only the call of 
humanity and hastened to help a fellow-being in distress. 

Notwithstanding the plain and forceful teaching of our 
Savior's parable, men still are asking by word and action, 
consciously and unconsciously, "V/ho is my neighbor?" 
And Masonry answers with Christ, "All the children of 
men ; the despised, the lowly, tlie unfortunate, the op- 
pressed, the wicked and the ungodly — as well as the high 
and mighty, the cultured, those bound to us by blood and 
creed, the comfortable and the self-satisfied." Every hu- 
man being has a claim upon my sympathies; the Free 
Mason's charity knows no bounds. The difference of race, 
of religion, of caste, meant nothing to the Good Samaritan. 
They mean nothing to the good Mason. The claims of 
humanity transcend all difference of race and creed and 
position. The true Mason is a friend of mankind — -a 
brother of the human race. And that is the real essence 
of democracy; for democracy rests upon those principles 



MASONS MUST BE PATRIOTS 601 

of fraternity and humanity that are at the foundation of 
Masonry. 

The Mason, then, of all citizens, must of necessity be a 
patriot. He must be inspired with that love of country 
which is more than mere sentiment and high-sounding cant. 
It is not enough for him to cheer when the flag goes by. 
It is not enough for him to feel a patriotic thrill and to 
stand uncovered when the national anthem is played. His 
patriotism must be positive and active. It must be one of 
the prime motives behind his every act. It must manifest 
itself in his attitude toward life and toward his fellows. 
It must impel him to make the problems of his country 
and the welfare of his countrymen his own intensely per- 
sonal concern. It must make him think of the United 
States of America — not as an abstraction symbolized by 
Uncle Sam or the fair figure of Columbia ; not as 3 million 
square miles of fertile plains and rock-ribbed mountains; 
not as a rich and powerful land; but as 100 million human 
souls whose brother he is ; whose life and well-being are of 
immediate personal concern to him. 

At no time in the history of our nation has there been 
so great a need as now, of this active, personal patriotism 
which places country above the individual, the common 
good above selfishness. We are given to flattering our- 
selves with the thought that we are God's chosen people, 
and that the destiny of the human race will be worked out 
by us in this new world. We look upon our Republic and 
its republican form of government, tho they are less 
than 140 years old, as established facts — as experiments 
tested and proved. And in this complacent satisfaction 
lies our danger. 

Today for the first time in a generation many of our 
people are stirred by fears of unknown foreign foes. Many 
of us are haunted by day and by night by specters of ships 
and guns and hordes of barbarians sweeping down upon 
our shores and laying waste our land. A call has come to 
arms, and thinking men and women dread what may result 



602 MASONRY AND DEMOCRACY 

from that call to this peace-loving nation, which above all 
others stands for the reign of law among nations as well 
as among men. 

My brethren, I realize it is folly to cry ''peace, peace," 
when there is no peace. That it is worse than folly stub- 
bornly to close our eyes to whatever danger may threaten 
us from a war-maddened, empire-drunkened foe — if such 
a foe exists. But the real peril to this Republic, the im- 
mediate danger to this free people, is not beyond the broad 
Atlantic where so many millions of our fellow beings are 
engaged in so vast and cruel a struggle. It is not across 
the wide Pacific where the little yellow man is looking for 
an outlet for his teeming millions and a larger field for 
his newly awakened energy and enterprise. I admit there 
is not a monarch nor a monarchy in all the world which 
would not rejoice to see the downfall of this Republic. 
King and emperor and czar, and the satellites of flunkey- 
ism, would welcome the failure of our experiment in self- 
government, because the failure of the American Republic 
would mean the doom of democracy. But it is not emperor 
and czar — nor their armies and navies that we need fear 
most. The peril that threatens us, very real and ever-pres- 
ent, lies not in the cabinets of Europe, but in the hearts of 
our own people. The republics of history have fallen, not 
to external foes, but as victims of their own disloyalty to 
the ideals of democracy — a foe more deadly than all the 
combined forces of the world. We can more easily turn 
back the foreign invader than we can stifle the discontent 
of large masses of people who believe they are not receiv- 
ing their just deserts at the hands of society. "We can more 
easily escape the shot and shell of Europe or Japan, than 
we can escape the benumbing and destructive effects of 
sloth and indifference and cynicism on the part of the peo- 
ple toward public affairs and the public service. No enemy 
can inflict upon us the utter ruin that we can bring upon 
ourselves by disloyalty to the American ideal. Our na- 
tional life, our very existence, must be fed by the springs 



AMERICA AND EUROPE 603 

of a deeply ardent patriotism in the heart of every citizen 
— a patriotism that transcends all narrow self-interest and 
lays a man's all upon the altar of his country. 

And so, my brethren, in this year of world-wide calamity, 
this year of tragedy so black that all the world stands ap- 
palled, it is well for us as men of peaceful, happy Kansas 
to turn our minds to what our country demands of us as 
men and as Free Masons. It is well for us to remember 
that our Masonic vows carry with them these great obliga- 
tions of citizenship ; to remember that the true Free Mason 
is a patriot of the highest type. 

No man can foresee the outcome of the world war, de- 
stroying daily so many human lives and consuming such 
vast treasure accumulated by the" toil of ages. But we 
know the world never again will be what it was before that 
fateful August, 1914. In our larger faith we may hope 
tliat good will come from it. But, it is difficult for the 
human eye and the human mind to see how this is possible. 
Our beloved country so far has escaped entanglements which 
would drag it into active participation in this vast mas- 
sacre of humanity. Yet we cannot hope altogether to es- 
cape its consequences. The future of America is affected 
to a greater or less degree by every battle fought on Eu- 
ropean soil. American diplomacy, American commerce, 
American industry and perhaps many details of American 
government itself will all be changed by the outcome of 
this war. "We dare not fold our hands in indifference and 
say it is no concern of ours. We must set our own house 
in order ; we must consecrate ourselves anew to the idea of 
democracy — to the eternal principles of a government of 
the people, by the people and for the people. Our great 
peril is here at home. 

I believe in America, in the spirit of the American peo- 
ple. I do not think the faith of our fathers is dead within 
us. I believe our country and its institutions rest on the 
solid rock of justice and righteousness which cannot be 
overthrown by all the powers of destruction, unless we our- 



604 MASONRY AND DEMOCRACY 

selves turn from these things. But no man who loves his 
country can think for a moment that we have attained the 
ideal state. 'No man who gives sober thought to the future 
can fail to see the shoals and breakers on every side. 

I stood recently, on a summer niglit, on Broadway — that 
great White Way ablaze with light and teeming with hu- 
manity. I saw stock-brokers and clerks, millionaires and 
their cashiers, women from homes of refinement, and 
painted, brazen harlots mingling together in one wild 
debauch of extravagance and license. I heard the ribald 
songs and saw the suggestive dances; and I asked myself, 
"Is this America, the land of the Pilgrim Fathers?" 

And then in my mind's eye, I saw the men and women 
who produced the wealfh squandered with such profligacy 
that night. I saw men stripped to the waist, in an inferno 
of heat, stoking furnaces in reeking holds of ocean-going 
vessels. I saw miners digging coal in tomb-like entry ways 
underground and the hovels in which they lived above 
ground. I saw men slaving at great blast furnaces. I saw 
the myriad workers in mills and factories. I saw pallid, 
joyless women and children in sweat shops and cotton mills. 
And instead of the hum of happy, contented industry, 
God's wages for wholesome toil, I seemed to hear the low 
rumblings of a mighty volcano, a volcano heaving with 
vast liuman misery, injustice and bitter discontent. 

I saw the schools of America — the bulwark of the nation, 
and saw with dismay that their doors were closed to nine 
out of ten of all the children of the land after they had 
acquired the mere rudiments of reading and writing. 

I saw a sane nation spending multi-millions of dollars 
for alcoholic drinks that ruin body, mind and soul. I saw 
thousinds of harlots dragging young manhood and young 
womanhood down to destruction. I saw tlie Church earn- 
estly but ineffectively striving to turn back this great flood 
of evil. 

I turned my eyes to the national capitol, to our state 
capitols and to our municipalities. Almost everywhere I 



EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY 605 

saw strife and dissension, extravagance and inefficiency 
and indifference, if not positive dishonesty. And I turned 
from it all as from a bad dream and cried out to myself: 
"This cannot be the America we love!" 

Is ours then a hopeless task? Have we fallen on evil 
times ? Need we despair of the future ? Is there no ' ' balm 
in Gilead"? 

AVe should be craven if we could look into one another's 
faces here today and let pessimism cloud our meeting. The 
very fact that so many good and true men of Kansas have 
gathered here in solemn conclave, to pledge themselves 
anew to the eternal principles of this noble order, gives the 
lie to the man who says that the spirit of justice, of fra- 
ternity, of charity and of patriotism is dead in America — 
that the issue is hopeless. We are true men. "We recognize 
divine authority" and we humbly bow to the divine injunc- 
tion. Our building has not been perfect ; but there is a 
God, and we still have the plummet and the square, and 
with God's help, our structure finally shall meet the ap- 
proval and merit the blessing of the Supreme Architect. 
Manhood is not dead in America. Step by step, we pro- 
gress surely though slowly toward better things; and I am 
happy in the belief, my brethren, that the teachings of this 
order, the quickening of conscience, the broadening of sym- 
pathy which comes to every true Mason, have greatly to 
do with the raising of ideals and the betterment of condi- 
tions in our national life. 

As Americans and as Free Masons, we believe in de- 
mocracy. We believe in the brotherhood of man. We 
believe in equality of opportunity. We believe in help for 
the weak and in charity for the unfortunate, and we are 
pledged to the principles of justice to all men — not the 
cold justice of stern, forbidding law which decrees "an 
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," but the justice of 
our Saviour, tempered by loving kindness that encompasses 
the whole world. In my deepest heart, I believe America 
is the testing ground of democracy. I believe that here is 



606 MASONRY AND DEMOCRACY 

the place and now is the time for the highest development 
of humanity. Mankind has ever come up thru diffi- 
culties, been both blessed and cursed by adversity. I have 
the deepest confidence in the American spirit and the 
American people. And, I believe that America is destined 
in God's providence to lead the people of the world to 
higher planes of life, to nobler aims and richer aspirations. 

I believe this wicked war in Europe will bring new 
world-wide responsibilities to us as a people ; I believe that 
in the cause of humanity it will be America that will bind 
up the wounds of the nations and lead the world back to 
peace, and it may be to a permanent peace. And I have 
every confidence that by God's grace the American people 
will rise to these new responsibilities. Our work, brethren, 
is here where we are. No man living but has his share. 
We touch the w^orld here. 

It is not in the busy marts of trade ; it is not in our 
great exchanges with their millions and their hundreds of 
millions of stocks and bonds ; it is not in our factories with 
their thousands of workmen ; it is not in our mines nor 
forests nor fertile fields with their rich products ; it is not 
in our ships that go down in the deeps nor in the thunder- 
ing trains that rush across our continent — it is not in these 
that we must seek the stimulus that will make America 
equal to the task before her. All these are necessary. The 
true American is "fervent in business." But it is not by 
our hands alone that our destiny is to be worked out. We 
must search the hearts of the people and find there the 
impulse for that righteousness and ambition for the com- 
mon good which alone makes a nation great. Unless the 
hearts of our people are right, America, too, will become 
engrossed in the materialism that is the undoing of civil- 
ization and the death of progress. 

T often think we people of Kansas fail to realize the 
happy conditions under which we live, and thereby fail to 
make the most of them and their great possibilities. Our 
lines have been cast in pleasant places. We are blessed 



KANSAS AND MATERIALISM 607 

beyond compare by the beneficence of the Supreme Archi- 
tect. Living in our "grassy parallelogram of plenty," 
where peace and prosperity smile upon us; far removed 
from the strife and turmoil of an embattled world, we are 
prone to forget the red hate now dominant thruout a 
continent. We hear the faint echoes of war, but so far 
away are they that we sit in smug complacency and think 
that all is well with the world so long as God is in His 
Heaven. And so we fail fully to comprehend the blessed 
conditions under which we live. I do not pretend that 
Kansas is an Earthly Paradise ; I do not think that the 
millennium has dawned on us in advance of the rest of 
the world; but I do believe that nowhere else on God's 
earth will be found a commonwealth of 1% millions of 
men and women who are so free from the greed, the ma- 
terialism, the cruel selfishness that brutally tramples upon 
the rights of others. I do not think we can find anywhere 
a people with broader sympathies and nobler aims. I do 
not know of another place where so much Christian charity 
abounds — or where men dwell together in closer brother- 
hood. 

And let us be thankful that while this spirit is dominant 
in Kansas, it is not confined to Kansas. At no time in 
the world's history have the hearts of men and women in 
civilized lands been so stirred, or have they given more 
freely of their means, or of themselves, to the relief of 
suffering. The "still sad music of humanity" that in the 
Middle Ages smote upon deaf ears is heard today. This 
world of ours becomes a braver, truer, nobler world, day 
by day, whatever pessimists and cravens choose to say and 
profess to believe. It is not calling in vain for the Good 
Samaritan who will stop and bind up the wounds of the 
afflicted and minister to the wants of him who has fallen 
by the wayside. 

History records nothing more inspiring than the untir- 
ing efforts, thru all the changes of the centuries, of 
those men and women who have labored to lift the human 



608 MASONRY AND DEMOCRACY 

race out of ignorance and vice and misfortune into a higher, 
happier, nobler existence and unite it in the "bond of 
brotherhood." And Masonry ever has led in this service. 

Despite the atrpcities in war-torn Europe, we still can 
believe that at no time in the history of humanity has the 
spirit of fraternity so swayed the hearts and minds of 
mankind as in this day. It leads the march of our advanc- 
ing civilization. And I believe it will constantly grow 
broader and broader in its application. Today the spirit 
of charity is not content with binding up the wounds of 
the man Avho falls into the hands of robbers on the road 
to Jericho, but it foresees the danger and makes the road 
safe. Tlie true spirit of fraternity is not content with re- 
lieving a distressed brother; it is only satisfied when it 
prevents distress. Modern fraternity is shamed by the 
bread line. It seeks to prevent any worthy man becoming 
an object of charity. 

The spirit of brotherhood which makes democracy pos- 
sible anticipates danger and prevents trouble. It is the 
spirit of personal service now exerted in behalf of the 
whole community. That is the spirit of true Masonry and 
more and more is it becoming the spirit of America. We 
have builded gigmtic fortunes, largely by accident ; but 
less and less does the mere material weight of wealth domi- 
nate our thought and excite the imagination of our people. 
More and more are we demanding of our rich men an ac- 
counting of their stewardship. More and more are we in- 
sisting upon fair dealing and simple justice for the weak 
and humble. And more and more do Wealth and Power 
realize their responsibility. We are a long way from the 
da'wiiing of that Perfect Day to which the eye of the Chris- 
tian ever is turned, but in America, at least, we find signs 
of a growing spirit of justice and fairness that bids us 
hold fast to our faith in the ultimate triumph of righteous- 
ness. 

And we as Masons, believing in a world-wide charity 
and a universal fraternity, must seek first of all to banish 



THE PARLIAMENT OF MAN 609 

from our hearts and from the hearts of our fellow coun- 
trymen, those twin devils — Hate and Fear — the twain that 
brings war and havoc to nations, and desolation and de- 
spair to human happiness. With that love in our hearts 
which is the basis of our order, with courage to do the 
right, tho the heavens fall, with faith in God and in 
our fellows, democracy in America is safe, and that day 
of "the parliament of man — the federation of the world," 
is not far distant. 
So Mote It Be. 

THE END. 



INDEX 



Achievements of Immigrants 35 

Administrative Board and Saving -o^ 

Agencies for Development ^^ j 

Age for the Young Man and Woman, An 441 

Age of Materialism. An Wo'-ioZl 

Allen. Henry J. ; 23rd Governor -^'^'--;i 

Altars of Patriotism Kept Burning ^- 

America and Europe ^^^ 

America's Holy Cause ^^ 

America and the Peace Council 1 ' 

America Can Deliver the Knock Out Blow J& 

America Makes War on Militarism 50 

America Keeps Faith _tt 

America Should Lead ^^ 

American Ideal. The • • • '^-J' 

American Red Cross and Its Functions 141.^14- 

Americanism Complete ^%ot 

Americanism. The Real --^ 

Americans Think for Themselves •^t)J 

Americans Training in Army Camps 1^ 

Appreciation of Election to Senate 15J 



Aspiration of Kansas. 



583 



Army Morally Clean, An 49 

Astor, John Jacob and True Patriotism 194 

Backbone of the Country, The 549 



Ballot Law 



272 



Baneful Influence of Some Cities 381 

Banish the Dark Dungeon 539 

Bar the Door Against Profit Wolves 133 

Be American First— Party Men Afterward 100 

Belgians Stand for Humanity 1|^ 

Belgium Wrecked 22 

Benefits the Whole State 389 

Better Business Preparation Needed 431 

Better Citizenship Essential 235 

Better Highways Necessary 108 

Better Organization Needed 499 

Better Rural Credits Needed 517 

Better Rural Schools Urged 255 

Big and Little Gougers 98 

611 



612 INDEX 

Bismarck's Plans Devilish Cunning 50 

Bolshevism Must be Curbed 225 

Bolshevism Outgrowth of Despair 225 

Bring the Boys Home 134 

Brotherhood of Man, The 547 

Brown, .John, The Immortal 195 

Build Up Home Industries 575 

Build a State 545 

Buying Public Supplies 589 

Buy Kansas Goods 581 

Call for Service Finds Kansans Busy 46 

Camps Clean. Abroad 112 

Camp Funston Visited 59 

Capital and Labor Tested 70 

Capital Crime, A 78 

Capital Is Timid 39 

Capital Gives Over Part of Excess Profits 94 

Candidate for GoverHor, A 304 

Centralized Administrative Authority » 337 

Checking the Waste 339 

Clean Camps, Appeal for 13 

Clean Soldier the Best Fighter 79 

Come Back Nobler Men 37 

Comfort the War Burdened 52 

Common People, the Burden Bearers 64 

Community Sanitation 554 

Comparing a Dry State with a Wet State 365 

Condition of the State 245 

Conscientious Public Service 582 

Constitutional Program Needed, A 265 

Consolidation of Boards 245 

Congress and Important War Messages 100 

Constructive Laws. Kansas Has 211 

Country's Advantages Over the City's 469 

Country Life Is Wholesome 483 

Co-operation and Good Will 491 

Co-operation, the Farmers' Greatest Need 497 

Check Insatiate Greed 227 

Children's Part in the War 138 

Children Are Easily Led 472 

Christmas Greetings to Kansas Yanks 158 

Christmas Gifts and Thrift Stamps 68 

Church and Its Civic Duty 519 

Church and Welfare 519 

Christian Citizenship 529 

Civil Service Law Urged 232 

Civil War Pensions 182 

Citizen.ship, The Future 89 

Crime of Using Grain and Coal to Make Booze 412 

Critical Situation. A 133 

Cutting Out Waste 210 



INDEX 613 

Deeds of Self Sacrifice 196 

Democvucy at Home ^''^ 

Democracy of America's Army 59 

Democracy in Education 217 

Democrats Make Many Mistakes 351 

Deplorable Conditions in Army Camps 112 

Disloyalty Must be Stamped Out 1<^1 

Doctrine of Helpfulness p-H 

Dollar for Dollar Government 313 

Doniphan Troops HI 

Don't Forget the Boys in the Camps ^5 

Don't Hamper the Producer _42 

Drastic Remedy Demanded 507 

Drink Increa>5es Vice -117 

Dry State and a Wet State 375 

Duty at Home 61 

Duty of the Newspapers 341 

Education, We Must Have 445 

Educational and Inspirational Talks 421 

Effect of Prohibition in Making Soldiers 402 

Efficiency to be Rewarded 210 

Efficient Public Service 200 

Efficient Service Needed 231 

Empty the Military Camps 135 

Encourage Clean Sports 453 

Encourage Civic Improvement 535 

Enemy at Home. The S3 

England's Freedom for Drink 113 

Enlistment in Army and Navy 6 

Equal Suffrage for All 213 

Equality of Opportunity 605 

Equity and Justice 531 

Europe? Withdraws Gl Millions from Industry 55 

European Labor in the United States 240 

Evil of Tax Dodging 253 

Evil of Tenancy and the Short Lease 491 

Evil, The Care of 201 

Examples of America's Genius 27 

Excessive Appropriations Reduced 331 

Excess Profits Taxes 29 

Exploiters at Home S3 

Exploiting the People 323 

Farewell Address 223 

Factors in Social Uplift 555 

For a Better Race in a Better World 550 

Farming and Farmer's Problems 479 

Farm Labor 4 

Farmers and Price Guarantee 128 

Farmers Fail to Get Prices Guaranteed 128 

Farmers Must Co-opei'ate 4S1 



614 INDEX 

Farmers' Tremendous Responsibility 4S9 

Farmers' Union Objects to Profiteering 116 

Farmers' Views on Profiteering 116 

Fate of War Inevitable 43 

Father and Son Week 142 

Fault Finding Must Stop 60 

Federal Land Banks 117 

Federal Trade Commission 129 

Federated Labor Union Pledges Support to Union 127 

Fight to a Finish and No Delays 94 

Fight for Democracy, A 16 

Finish the Job 107 

Final Overthrow of War 44 

First Man Regulated. The 126 

Flag Acceptance Speech 1S6 

Flag Day Proclamation 151 

Flower of American Manhood, The 54 

Food Administration and Hog Price Guarantee 131 

Food Administration and Protection of People 121 

For an Aggressive War Policy 35 

Foresight of Training Camps 50 

Foundation of Riches 425 

Fourth Liberty Loan Proclamation 145 

Fourth of July Proclamation 146 

Frankness with Public. Necessary .^.1 

Frightful Toll of Drink 403 

Frivolity. A Modern Fault 463 

Fun of Being Governor. The 269 

Future of Farming 505 

Future Citizenship S9 

Give Every Child a Chance 465 

Gift from Kansas 1S7 

Get the Gougers 53 

Golden Rule in Business, The 339 

Good Leaders Are Needed 353 

Good Schools Are Essential 435 

Good Government Essential 317 

Gougers Undoing What Kansas Has Done 125 

Governniont Extra vagaiice and T'scless Offices 318 

Government Must be Honest with the People. The 30 

Government Not Experimental 202 

Graft in Courts 327 

Graftston. Edward, Engineer 106 

Grand Army Is Unique Body 183 

Great Britain. Our Powerful Ally 75 

Great Social Reformers 102 

Greater Kansas Citizenship, A 298 

Great Men of Kansas, The 287 

Great Power of Free America, The 17 

Guaranty That Failed to Guarantee 131 



INDEX 615 

Handling Tax Dodgers 253 

Hatred of Battle 567 

Heroes AVortliy of Honor 1«S9 

Hitting Our Stride 91 

Hogs of Hog Island, The 80 

Home Back Ground, The 36 

Home, Our Most Important Business 439 

Home Conveniences Needed 439 

Home Fires Burning, Keep 52 

Homestead Act 165 

Hoover and the Regulation of Prices 63 

How a Little Girl Helped to Win the War 68 

How Democrats Increase Taxes 319 

How Kansas Invests Its Wealth 367 

How They Play the Game 423 

How We Can Help to Win the War 32 

Household Economics 5 

Human Hogs in War Time 27 

Human Welfare 261, 262 

Ideals of Public Service 305 

Immigrants and American Language 170 

Immigration to the Farms 239 

Impairing Soil Fertility 130 

Imported Trouble Makers 103 

Importance of Getting Started Right 436 

Importance of Juvenile Employment 461 

Importance of Parental Influence 470 

In Appreciation of Election as Senator 159 

Inaugural Address, First 205 

Inaugural Address, Second 213 

In Accord with Roosevelt 106 

Improvement of Public Service 247 

Incarceration Laws Amended 261 

Increasing Food Production 493 

Industrial Development Needed in Kansas 213 

Industrial Rewards 171 

Inefficient State Government 335 

Interesting Comparison 267 

Integrity, the Only Sound Basis 310 

Issue of Unconditional Surrender 96 

I. W. W., The 85 

Jewish-Armenian Relief 161 

Judicial Districts and Reductions 248 

Junior Red Cross Proclamation 138 

Kansas Agricultural Problems 479 

Kansas Always Ready to Fight for the Right 10 

Kansas Attitude, The 511 

Kansas and Kansas Ideals 277, 294 

Kansas and the Lusitania 1 



616 INDEX 

Kansas and Materialism 607 

Kansas and Preparedness 6 

Kansas Boys and Girls 470 

Kansas Buckles on the Armor 2 

Kansas Debt to Others 284 

Kansas Farmers Good Investment 427 

Kansas Fighting Men Win New Glory 21 

Kansas Has Great Resources 207 

Kansas Is Grateful to Civil War Veterans 1S4 

Kansas Is Making Progress 4!Jo 

Kansas Is Not Stingy 401 

Kansas Livestock Men Lose Money 129 

Kansas Made Goods, Buy 5S1 

Kansas.' Material Progress 102 

Kansas Natural Gas Company 325 

Kansas Needs Her Young People 472 

Kansas Out of Debt 177 

Kansas Pride in Her Fighting Men 43 

Kansas Prosperity 290 

Kansas Ready for Good Roads 590 

Kansas Record of Achievements 286 

Kansas Responds to All War Calls 105 

Kansas Soldiers Are the Best 57 

Kansas the Soldier State 187 

Kansas Spent Millions 511 

Kansas State Council of Defense 2 

Kansas Statistics ; 178 

Kansas Stood First 185 

Kansas Traveling Librai'y 237 

Kansas Type of Patriotism 193 

Kansas Was Settled by Fighting Men 9 

Kansas Will Go the Limit 411 

Keep the Flag Flving 90 

Kicking Off the Shackles 321 

Knotty Questions Must be Solved 461 

Labor and Its Part 71 

Laborers Hard Hit 128 

Lack of Thoroness in Modern Training 466 

Laws in Kansas. Constructive and .lust 210, 211 

Law to Help Mothers 551 

Leader Among the States 283 

Leadership of Kansas Republicans .329 

League of Fi-ee Nations, A 1G6 

Lenders to the Government 53 

Lengthen Office Tenure 249 

Lessons of Experience 451 

Let Kansas Respond 153 

Let the Soldiers Keep Their Uniforms 1.37 

Letter from Home, The 66 

Letter to Fuel Administration 114 

Letter to Secretary Baker 134 



INDEX 617 

Libel on Decency. The 397 

Liberty Day 1"*? 

Liberty Loan, Fourth 144, 14.j 

Liberty Loan Proclamatiou 1''52 

Liberty Loan, The Third 1">2, 153 

Life More Sacred Than Money 40 

Limit Campaign Expenses 239 

Lincoln and Human Welfare 541 

Liquor Interests Dominate New York 415 

Local Co-operation p 

Losing Business, A 132 

Love of Humanity 141 

Loyal Service and Sacrifice 9 

Loyalty of the Foreign Born 45 

Luxuries Must Go 41 

Make Country Life Attractive • • • 485 

Make Politics Serve the People 315 

Make the Schools Practical 459 

Make Your Opportunity 475 

Making All the World Safe 51 

Manufacturing in Kansas 574 

Manual Training Is Valuable 433 

Many Environments Are Hopeless 455 

Many Famous Authors 289 

Many Misfortunes. Drink Causes 407 

Many Problems to Solve 303 

Many Wonderful Achievements 279 

Maryland Budget System 248 

Masonry and Democracy 599 

Masons Must be Patriots GOl 

Massachusetts Ballot 271-273 

Memorial Day 150 

Men of All Faith Fight : Must be No Bickering 98 

Men Who Promote War 559 

Men Who Were Loyal 357 

Merit System in Kansas 263 

Messages to the Legislature 230 

Methodist Church the Prophet of Prohibition 414 

Middle West and the Realization of War 57 

Minimum Price, A 120 

Militarism. . 59 

Miscellaneous Addresses 573 

Mobilizing Our Boy and Girl Army 446 

Modern System 215 

Moncheur. Baron 18 

Morale of the Army 72 

More Centralization Needed 345 

More Common Sense Needed 313 

More Than Europe's Quarrel 76 

Motorize Country Roads 168 

Municipal Industries 597 



618 INDEX 

Must Produce More Food 495 

Must Regulate Prices 503 

Must Revise State's Business Methods 309 

Must Save the Children 533 

Must See the War Thru 76 

Must Stop Reckless Spending 347 

Narrow Partisanship in Public Affairs 347 

Nation Calls for the Service of All, The 22 

Nation Wide Prohibition 315 

National Prohibition 175 

National Suffrage 213 

National War Council 84 

Nebraska and Its Ballot Law 272 

Necessity of Sacrifice 143 

Need of Business Men in Politics 342 

Need of Common Honesty 312 

New Baptism. A 222 

New Governor. The 229 

New World's Dawn 92 

Night Schools and Practical Education 454 

No Danger of Profiteering in Farming 508 

No Favors Shown Producers 509 

No Half Way Victory 87 

Nonpartisan League 85 

Not a Party Question 273 

Not a Sentimental Question 48 

Not Food Embargo But Suppression of Food Trust Needed... 511 

Nothing Less — Absolute Surrender and Abdication 156 

No Time for Fault Finders 61 

No Time for Half Way Service 60 

No Time for Quibbling When Our Boys Are Dying 84 

No Slum Districts Now 399 

Now Draft the Money Bags 14 

Official Denials Fool Nobody Ill 

Old Guard of 1S60 87 

One Hiuidred Per Cent Americanism 92 

One Law for Everybody 123 

One of Freedom's Martyrs 198 

"One of These Little Things" 69 

Opportunities in Kansas 579 

Opportunities in Kansas for Young Men and Women 421 

Orphans in Private Homes 201 

Our Debt to the Church 523 

Our Duty and Responsibility at Close of World War 565 

Our Greatest Debt Maker 383 

Our Two Deadliest Foes 56 

Our Valiant Allies 75 

Our War With Greed 63 

Our Young Men Sound 114 

Over There and Care of Boys 88 



INDEX 619 



P'ackei's' Control of Livestock Market 501 

Parliament of Man. The 609 

Partyism and the War 99 

Party With a Record, A 359 

Patriotic Rivalry 101 

Patriotism 179 

Patriotism, A Deeper 194 

Patriotism, Altars of 32 

Patriotism and Profits 38, 82 

Patriotism, Appeal lor a Genuine 308 

Patriotism in the Home 91 

Patriotism of Early Settlers 285 

Patriotism of Kansas Foreign Born 34 

Peace Loving People, A 7 

Peace Thru a Federation of Nations 25 

People's Turn Next, The 78 

Perils of France 135 

Pershing Day _ 157 

Pledges as Senator 160 

Plea for Loyalty to the Government 307 

Plea for Simple Life 584 

Plea for World Peace 556 

Policy of True Americans 355 

Political Party's Duty 328 

Politics and Government 301 

Pork Barrel 330 

Practical Education the Need of Today 427 

Practical Work in Night Schools 456 

Practice of Economics 5 

Preacher of Americanism, A 46 

Prepare Now for War Conditions 8 

Preparing for Peace 75 

Price Kansas Paid 419 

Priceless Heritage 199 

Price of Heroism 23 

Price Regulation 63 

Prison or Big Stick for Packers 505 

Privilege of Giving, The 144 

Problems of Humanity 459 

Problems of Law Enforcement 373 

Problems of Rural Life Many and Diverse 515 

Proclamations and Letters 109 

Profiteer, Greatest Traitor 53 

Profiteering Is Treason 105 

Profiteering Must End 97 

Profiteers Wrecking Livestock Industry 118 

Profit Wolves, Bar the Door Against 133 

Prohibition Addresses 365 

Prohibition as a War Measure 410 

Prohibition Helps Other Reforms 387 

Prohibition in Kansas 176 

Prohibition Law Rigidly Enforced in Kansas 371 



620 INDEX 



Prohibition's Greatest Battle Yet to Come 417 

Prohibition Should be National 221 

Prohibition the Nation's Great Need 257 

Protect Asainst Inequitable Freight Rates 122 

Protect Our Boys 154 

Protect Soldiers from Vice 47 

Prussianism Must End 94 

Public Office or Public Trust 343 

Public Welfare 235 

Pulling in Harness G2 

Put Down Profiteering 114 

Put Public Business on a Business Basis 58G 

Real Test of the Soldier SO 

Rebidce Favoritism Whenever Found 104 

Red Cross Apiieal 154 

Red Cross Roll Call 141 

Reduce Burdensome Taxes 207 

Regulation Should Not be One-Sided 23 

Relic of Barbarism 557 

Republicanism and What It Stands for 354 

Republicanism the Hope of the Nation 348 

R'>pn!;li(an Principles Ar;* Sound 34!) 

Republicans Must Make Good 311 

Responsibility of Parents and Teachers. 447 

Results of 34 Years of Prohibition 305 

Rights of the People, The 543. 561 

Road Impi'ovement 239 

Roosevelt. Theodore, and Swollen Fortunes 173 

Rotten Receiverships and Disrespect for Law 320 

Rural Credits 238, 517 

Rural Schools Stronger 236 

Russia's Valiant Defen.se 20 

Sacrificial Americanism 93 

Saloons Increase Public Debt 335 

Saloons Lead to Ruin 395 

Sanitation as a Factor in Community Uplift 5.53 

Santa Fe Shops 176 

Science Condemns Alcohol 409 

See Everything But Overlook Much 439 

Second Inaugural Address 213 

Second Message to Legi.slature 243 

Shame of War Profits. The 28 

Simple Life in War Time, The 33 

Significance of the Flag 197 

Significance of Memorial Day 181 

Single State Administration Board 268 

Social Service Program 531 

Soldiers Retain Uniforms 137 

Something New for Kansas 5.53 

Some Ugly Facts Observed 449 



INDEX 621 

Special Message on Appropriations 2G5 

Speculators, National Enemy 12 

Speedy Price Regulation 127 

Spirit of Abraham Lincoln 363 

Spirit of Helping, The 70 

Spirit of Republican Party 357 

Square Deal for All 537 

Stamp Out Pro-Germanism 86 

Standards Are High 211 

Stand by the Stock Raiser 119 

State Board of Health and Birth Record 235 

State Food Engineer 259 

State Guard 101. 102 

State Highway Commission 593 

State Levy. The 259 

State Oil Department 258. 259 

State With Opportunities. A 293 

Stay on the Farm— Don't Go to Big Cities 482 

Stop Organized Murder 563 

Storage Facilities Necessary 513 

Stricken People Call. A 161 

Suppress the Food Trust 512 

Supreme Duty of Every Man 41 

Take Care of the Boys Abroad 88 

Talk About Boys, A 451 

Taught by Precept and Example 437 

Taxation Has Increased 201 

Teach Thrift to Young People 476 

Testing Fire and Our Hour of Trial 70 

Text Books Published by State 255 

Text Books for Schools 237 

Thanksgivings Day Proclamation 140 

'"The Interests" in Food Regulation 117 

This Must be the Last War 24 

To Stake All for Peace 26 

Too Much Power for Bosses 587 

Too Many Children Out of School 457 

Toast, A 375 

Too Much Needless Legislation 333 

Tried in the Fire 38 

Twentieth Century, a Time of Unrest 94 

Two Primary Profits 29 

Unbeaten People, An 18 

Unconditional Surrender' Demanded 155 

Unfair Fight by Saloons 385 

Uniform Accounting Needed 241 

ITnited States and Self Defense 17 

United States War Work Campaign 63 

United War Work 143 



622 INDEX 

Value of Food Used for Booze 413 

Vice Deadlier Than Bullets 14 

Vicious Profiteering 121 

Victory Complete 87 

Victory for Packers, A 501 

Vision for Young Kansans 429 

Viviani and General Joff re 55 

Volunteer at Home, The 102 

War Anniversary Day 148 

War for Progress. A 186 

War Is Unnecessary 527 

War's Only Justification 562 

Wartime Profits Dirty Dollars 54 

War Should be Abolished 569 

War Profits to Government 28 

War Savings Day 147 

Waste Is Wicked 56 

Wasteful System, A 209 

Wasting Coal and Grain 414 

Washington Will Follow Kansas Custom 31 

Watch Machine Politics 599 

Way to Get Out Is to Fight Out, The 49 

Webb-Kenyon Law 257 

West Needs Young Farmers 137 

We Must Pay the Cost 108 

What Kansas Gave 188 

What Prohibition Has Done for Kansas 376 

When War Will Cease 563 

What Becomes of the Untrained 467 

Whisky Is a Health Wrecker 405 

AVhite Slave Traffic 525 

Wholesome Living Conditions 172 

Why Kansas Is Prosperous 371 

Why People Like Kansas 393 

Women of Kansas, The 295 

Wood, Major General 49, 139 

Woodmen, Address to 9 

Work, the Measure of Service 73 

Work. Work, Work 37 

World Wide Influence 190 

Worthy Ally, A 77 

Worst Human Slavery 377 

World Is Growing Better 71 

Worship of Money 81 

Y. M. C. A. Work to Keep Men Fit 73 

Young Farmers, West Needs 137 

Young Men Needed at Home 136 

Y'^oung People Must Make Good 443 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



016 094 417 1 





